Building facilitation capacity through participatory practices.
Working in social movements, we can often find our collective processes painful, unsatisfactory and poorly fulfilling of our values of inclusivity, care and collaboration. How can we stay creative, responsive, effective, and most importantly – in relationship – amidst the inevitable tensions of working with others? The Participatory Facilitation course will be a space to engage with these questions, opening opportunities for exchange and exploration of a range of facilitation tools and methodologies, deepening facilitation skills and sensibilities, for those who already hold facilitation roles in their groups and organisations.
Working in social movements, we can often find our collective processes painful, unsatisfactory and poorly fulfilling of our values of inclusivity, care and collaboration. The (important!) tensions that arise between exclusion – inclusion, tasks – processes – relationships, diversity – commonality, autonomy – cooperation, innovation – conservation and so on, are often present in our groups as we are trying to create collaborative visions and projects. The interlocking systems of oppression in which our organising takes place do not make this task easier! Being able to navigate and facilitate collective spaces for discussion and decision making requires skills, tools and thoughtful processes that can remain responsive and adaptive to different organising contexts and situations.
How can we stay creative, responsive, effective, and most importantly – in relationship – amidst the inevitable tensions of working with others?
The Participatory Facilitation course will be a space to engage with this challenge, opening opportunities for exchange and exploration of a range of facilitation tools and methodologies, deepening facilitation skills and sensibilities, for those who already hold facilitation roles in their groups and organisations.
Aims of the course:
This course is aimed at trainers and facilitators who want to deepen their skills in facilitating participatory processes and collective spaces – including addressing challenging topics and situations. This course won’t be focusing on basic, entry-level facilitation skills.
The course aims to:
We will explore methodologies such as Radical Popular Education, Participatory Action Research, Appreciative Inquiry, Theatre of the Oppressed, Theory U, Improvisation, Process work, art of hosting, generative dialogue, observation and mindfulness amongst others.
Who is it aimed at?
Anyone with experience in facilitation and in socially engaged action addressing ecological, political and social justice issues. We embrace a broad definition of activism, including: Resistance – action preventing further damage to ecosystems and social justice; Renewal – action focused on developing and creating alternatives for healthier societies and communities; and Building Resilience – action supporting increased resilience in communities to weather the uncertain times ahead.
The course will be delivered in accessible, international English.
This course might NOT be for you if you are looking for a basic, entry-level course on facilitation skills.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
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Isa (she/her) is an educator, facilitator, and author. She grew up in France before setting off on an adventure to London, where she worked as a freelance journalist, French teacher, and administrator for a community arts organisation, all while writing her PhD on the concept of community. She became Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London (UK), where she taught for 10 years before leaving academia to breathe the air of freedom and collective action. She co-founded and co-facilitates, with Jay Jordan, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which has been bringing together artists and activists since 2004 to co-design and implement creative forms of direct action that are as joyful as they are politically effective. Active in social movements for over 20 years, she has facilitated assemblies of several hundred people, co-organised international mobilisations and climate camps, and trained thousands of people in reinventing forms of civil disobedience. Her passion is exploring collective dynamics and all the ways in which these can be made more fruitful, joyful, and caring, particularly through popular education and rituals. She has been involved with the zad in Notre Dame des Landes since 2016.
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An Maeyens (she/her) is a facilitator and trainer with over two decades of experience in grassroots movements. She specialises in creative, inclusive agenda design and brings deep expertise on group culture, power dynamics, and transformative learning. Starting of in the anti-globalisation movement she has trained thousands in civil disobedience, supported international coalitions, and developed multilingual training programmes and toolkits. Her work spans movements, cultures, and countries, guided by a commitment to care, accessibility, and leaderful organising.
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Ari’s activism began in 2002, at age 16, as a Bosnian refugee in Canada, where they founded and coordinated a group for LGBTIQ high school students and allies. They were a co-founder and leader at kolekTIRV in Croatia and Trans Network Balkan, involved in community organizing, advocacy, program management, team coordination, capacity building, education, media work, campaigns, events, fundraising, etc. In 2024, they joined the Supervisory Board of the Croatian Trade Union Collective of United Precarious Workers and Activists (SKUPA).
Beyond the Balkan region, Ari served as a Board member at Transgender Europe (TGEU), where they held roles as Secretary, Treasurer, and later Co-chair. They have also been a trainer with the Center for Artistic Activism and served on the Advisory Committee and since 2022 as a Community Care Facilitator at FRIDA — The Young Feminist Fund. Since 2024 they are the Operations Manager at Global Philanthropy Project.
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Sergio (all pronouns) was born in Romania and migrated to Germany in the early 2010s. In the past, he was a social worker with homeless people and a social consultant for Eastern European migrants for various organisations. Trained as a filmmaker, he spent two years making a documentary about the ‘civic reawakening’ in Romania and the waves of protest it brought with it. In connection to this, Sergio is currently co-steering the development of an online open-source participative knowledge production platform on activism in Romania. Over the past nine years, Sergiu has offered his skills to various journalists, grassroots collectives and campaigns, mostly working within the labour rights, climate justice, international solidarity and anti-authoritarian movements in Germany and Romania. Nonetheless, his biggest focus since 2020 has been his work as an organiser with the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers Union, where he focuses mostly on organising Romanian migrant workers on construction sites, in factories and in the agricultural field.
Ulex: Latin (argelaga Catalan, gorse English) noun:
1. A thorny-evergreen flowering shrub, with a high capacity for regeneration and resilience. Its seedpods open in contact with fire and it reshoots from charred stumps. A successionary plant that grows well under challenging conditions. It improves soil fertility through nitrogen fixing, preparing the way for renewed biodiversity.
2. A traditional choice for igniting fires. Burns hot and bright.
3. A networked project adding nutrition and fertility to European social movements through training and capacity building. It kindles the realisation of social justice, ecological intelligence, and cognitive vitality.
