Building power from the margins to achieve large scale social transformation.
Our movements are made up of many interconnected struggles. We are all impacted by the interlocking systems of oppression we seek to transform. But we are all impacted in different ways. Some of us will carry more risk and challenge than others at any given moment, often related to how our communities are being targeted by systems of oppression. Organising well involves building solidarity across these different experiences. It includes finding ways to build and hold a sense of togetherness despite our diverse experiences.
This course is grounded in a Transformative Organising methodology, an approach to building collective power that draws on a range of intersecting and overlapping skill sets or competences. It will specifically support participants to: recognise the complexity of organising across power differences, bridging the gaps between diverse experiences; explore processes for building and sustaining shared and distributed leadership; and support resourcefulness and inspiration, in prefigurative ways.
You are invited to bring what you are dealing with, your projects and their challenges, so the group can be a space to reflect, test, and develop your practice – and to learn from others, organising in different contexts.
If you want to improve your skills for organising in solidarity with and alongside others and their struggles, this course is for you.
Organising amidst diverse experiences of struggle and intensity means working within conditions shaped by inequality, pressure, and complexity. It is through working with and alongside one another, building solidarity and collective agency, that we transform and shift these conditions. In order to be able to do that, with systemic transformation in mind, we need specific knowledge, skills and capacities, practices and organising cultures that can work skillfully with power, collectively hold leadership and direction, and sustain the conditions – creative, relational, and visionary – that allow communities to act effectively together over time.
Building resilient and solidarity based communities, building transformative capacities, means organising in ways that can bear tension, sustain relationships under pressure, and continue to act within ongoing conditions of injustice, finding ways to connect to vision and inspiration beyond existing systems of oppression and rooted in the practice of solidarity.
At the centre of this course lies an aspiration for social movements to develop their capacities for practicing solidarity for the sake of systemic transformation. Solidarity practice is for us rooted in a rigorous implementation of and striving for togetherness. We understand togetherness as an antidote to the separation created and maintained by interlocking systems of oppression. Togetherness is rooted in recognition of the systemic conditions we find ourselves in and the development of solidarity skillsets that help us radically challenge and transform these conditions on different levels – personal, group, social movements and socio-political. We see solidarity and togetherness as a practice – skills and capacities we develop over time and together. This inevitably means making mistakes along the way, requiring an approach of constant adaptation, humility and forgiveness – of ourselves and each other.
Across the week, we will work with practices, tools, and questions that draw from three key areas of the Transformative Organising approach: active solidarity and power; participation and shared leadership; and creative and imaginative practice as an organising skill.
1 Active Solidarity and Power
We will explore active solidarity as a practice – the foundation from which shared leadership and creative action become possible.
This includes recognising how systems of oppression shape us in relation to our different social positionalities, and how this shows up in how we organise, relate, and make decisions in our organising.
The focus is on:
2 Participation and shared leadership
Organising cannot rely on a few people carrying everything.
We work with leadership as something that is shared, developed, and sustained collectively.
This includes:
We will explore how to build organising processes that are not dependent on individual authority, and how to sustain momentum, care, and accountability — including when resources are limited and pressures are high.
This also includes working with conflict, and the realities of staying in relationship over time.
3 Creative and imaginative practice as organising method
Creative practice is not an add-on, it is a way of organising.
We explore how storytelling, play, embodiment, and collective imagination can:
We will also be working with trauma-aware approaches, recognising the impacts of stress, burnout, and challenging lived conditions, exploring how creative and embodied practices can support resilience and continuity.
Throughout the week, we will work directly with your projects and challenges, using the group as a space for reflection, experimentation, and collective learning. Please reflect on some of this material in advance of the course.
Aims of the course
Methodologies we will use
Who’s it aimed at?
People engaged in ecological, political, and social justice work who are organising in solidarity with and alongside others and their struggles.
We embrace a broad definition of activism, including:
The main spoken language on the course will be English.
For accessibility and venue information see <here>.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
to apply
Location:
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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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.
Location:
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.
Location:
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.
