Courses and Events

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 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.

How do we use organizing strategically in our activism and movement building? How do we develop a practice of transformative organizing, from organizing 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 Organizing Network (ECON) and part of the Ulex Programme will help you address some of these challenges by developing your competencies for Transformative Organizing.

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.

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.

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.