Courses and Events

A range of tools, collective and personal, which can make our activism more effective and sustainable. They can help us avoid burnout and add continuity to our movement building. A ‘regenerative’ approach goes beyond sustainability to explore how we can organise in ways that actually renew or revitalize our own resources and those of our groups – this can help us stay inspired, nourished, & more creative in our tactical approach.

This training will share a framework for Leaderful Organising. It includes practices and understanding that can help organisations and groups to distribute power and leadership effectively. It offers an approach that addresses two related issues: the problems of leadership, that can lead to entrenched power interests, poor accountability, disempowerment, and traditional hierarchical structures, and; the problems of leaderlessness, where social movements and organisations, rejecting leadership adopt ‘horizontal’ structures in ways that can lack direction, continuity, and coherence.

We hear a lot about fragmentation within our movements and about the need to make them more diverse, inclusive, and empowering. We know that there are deep challenges involved in overcoming forms of oppression, such as racism, patriarchy, or ableism, which can often be reproduced within our movements themselves. This training aims to help us explore these challenges and to develop practices and strategies to build diverse movements capable of embodying active solidarity,and mutual empowerment.

Activists, human rights defenders, and political organisers across Central and Eastern Europe work and operate in a hostile climate. Conservatism, misogyny, economic scarcity and rise of the far right are only a few of the threats they face. This impacts our own and collective wellbeing, as well as our effectiveness, and, especially in the long run, it can deter and hinder efforts towards greater social, ecological and economic justice.

This Training of Trainers aims to support LGBTQI+ activists who want to grow as activist-trainers or want to step into trainer roles and use holistic methods of education and facilitation for activists and change makers. Integral Activist Training is holistic, transformative, participatory and embodies solidarity.

A training for experienced activists and organisers involved in movement level thinking and practice. An opportunity to inquire deeply into how our organisations and networks relate to the wider ecology of our movements – and how these movements relate to wider struggles in the ever changing cultural, socio-political and ecological context. Participants will engage in deep analysis of their own movement practice and ecology. They will gain skills and understanding to make their activism and organising more powerful and transformative.

Effective strategies for social transformation involve the contest for how we think, how we see, and the stories we tell about our world. New stories, new thinking, help new worlds come into being. This training aims to help our movements to tell better stories for a different world.

A range of tools, collective and personal, which can make our activism more effective and sustainable. They can help us avoid burnout and add continuity to our movement building. A ‘regenerative’ approach goes beyond sustainability to explore how we can organise in ways that actually renew or revitalize our own resources and those of our groups – this can help us stay inspired, nourished, & more creative in our tactical approach.

This training is about making our action count. It shares key tools and helps build skills for developing effective and responsive strategies. Using a hands-on and applied-experiential learning method, participants will learn to analyse contexts, create vision, identify opportunities and challenges, and develop responsive plans to move towards their objectives. At this crucial time for our social movements, the need for focused, well-crafted, and well-informed strategies couldn’t be more important.

Change is multi-layered. The social field, our organisational cultures, and the individuals within them arise in mutual dependence upon each other. Integral Activist Training supports integrated transformation on all of these levels. Integral Activist Training builds this awarenss into the way we do activist education.

Working with others is not always easy. It can feel frustrating, draining and unproductive. Meetings drag, personalities clash, conflicts arise. But collaboration is key to collective agency and empowerment. It’s a basis for effectiveness, and it can bring forth emergent and creative qualities that alone we can barely imagine. Collaboration is a vital context for individual transformation, enabling us to embody our deepest values.

Resilience is all about connection: Deeper connection with our self, deeper connections with each other, and deeper connection with nature. Today we face immense challenges – social, ecological and political. We can be daunted by the scale and extent of the problems. We can feel overwhelmed and undermined. Where can we find the resilience and strength needed to meet them?

This course draws on our longer Ecology of Social Movements Training - redesigned as a week-long course adapted to the context of Central and Eastern Europe. A training for experienced activists and organisers involved in movement level thinking and practice. Participants will engage in deep analysis of their own movement practice and ecology. They will gain skills and understanding to make their activism and organising more powerful and transformative.

A range of tools, collective and personal, which can make our activism more effective and sustainable. They can help us avoid burnout and add continuity to our movement building. The workshop is specifically designed to address needs, issues and challenges that BIPOC activists face in their work and lives.

Activists, human rights defenders, and political organisers can suffer attacks at the hands of both State and non-State actors seeking to hinder their work. This damages our effectiveness and the wellbeing of ourselves and those around us. Such attacks can deter and hinder efforts towards greater social justice and ecological integrity. This training offers methods of analysis, strategy and implementation to protect spaces for activism and resistance.

How do we use organising strategically in our activism and movement building? How do we develop a practice of transformative organising, from organising in silos to building long term alignments, from fighting short term campaigns to advancing a long-term agenda, from applying narrow approaches to power to an expansive one, from protesting from the outside to building governing power? This training designed and delivered by the European Community Organising Network (ECON) and part of the Ulex Programme will help you address some of these challenges by developing your competencies for Transformative Organising.

This training will help you to learn the know-how of building more inclusive and empowering environments for activism and social change work. Applying knowledge, frameworks and concepts used in anti-oppression work, we'll explore ways to deal with discrimination and oppression at the individual, organizational and systemic levels - learning how to understand our struggles through the lens of intersectionality.