Courses and Events

This training strengthens the ability to act and strategize in ways that are most aligned with values rooted in solidarity

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 week long event will bring together a group of richly talented facilitators and practitioners to share and explore creative tools that can be used in a variety of social change settings. It will take a cross/multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on theatre, story, image, dance, and music – and apply these to community empowerment, campaign development, and direct action.

This Training for Trainers aims to support trainers, facilitators and educators who want to use nature-based and eco-systemic approaches of education and facilitation for activists and change makers seeking to empower defence of the earth and struggles for social justice. Those of us who practice such work know how deeply transformative it can be and how it can offer insight, healing, connection and deep shifts in perspective. What can we do to make it more effective and powerful as a stimulus and support to social and ecological action and the deeper transformations needed? For those of us facilitating social and political change making, how do we weave a more embedded, participatory and ecological understanding into our work? And how do we ensure that when working with these ecological and nature-based modalities we don’t inadvertently repeat the patterns of harm we’re trying to change?

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.

This training explores skills and understanding needed to sustain and consolidate our movements. It offers new thinking and learning for fresh approaches to leadership. On the one hand, this needs to provide a clear critique of classical models of leadership (authoritarian, top-down and often bestowed with patriarchal tendencies). On the other hand, it needs to address the pitfalls recognised in what Jo Freeman described as a “tyranny of structurelessness”, where informal power still is unequal and groups become without clear direction, accountability or viable strategy.

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.

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.

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.

We will be exploring the key challenge we hear again and again across our movements: that our movements lack the capacity to develop longer term and responsive strategies for deep social transformation. Social change is highly complex, as are social movements themselves, and strategising at this level requires more than simply upscaling the tools we might use for individual organisations and campaigns. We’ll look for responses to this challenge by drawing on case studies, and exploring skillsets and tools for strategizing at scale and amidst volatile and unpredictable conditions.