Knowledge, skills and perspectives to challenge oppression and create spaces of solidarity
Our organising work sits within a global and historical system of interlinking forms of oppression. These shape the material, relational, and psychological conditions that influence every one of us. Unfortunately, as many of us will have witnessed, this means that within our groups and organisations, we are likely to reproduce mechanisms of oppression, often unconsciously. Without the skills to identify and transform those patterns, they will give rise to tensions and misunderstandings and will make our organising not aligned with the values of solidarity and empowerment we strive for. We can find ourselves reproducing the barriers to participation, empowerment and well-being that we see in the world around us. This is especially depleting for people who are already marginalised and discriminated against and needs to be addressed if our groups are to be genuinely empowering and transformative spaces.
Starting with the basic frameworks and concepts used in anti-oppression work, participants will explore ways to identify and transform the dynamics of oppression at both the individual and organisational level and understand how they relate to systemic dimensions of socio-economic injustice.
This training is part of the Ulex Central and Eastern Europe Programme pilot year. It is designed and delivered by a training team embedded in CEE social movements.
Navigating topics related to anti-oppression in our groups is not easy, often brings up trauma responses, tensions, and conflicts and leads to the erosion of trust. To move away from reproducing harmful oppression patterns, we need to learn to build cultures of care, and move away from shame and blame towards a culture of reciprocity, accountability and collective transformation.
Through this kind of work, we can become increasingly skilled in transforming harmful tensions and conflict into enriching growth opportunities, and through better working with diversity, we can include a wider range of perspectives, experiences, and histories, for more adaptable, resilient, and powerful movements that exemplify values we strive for.
Systems of oppression often sustain themselves when we are unable to acknowledge and work well with the power dynamics, social privilege and mechanisms of discrimination that exist in our groups, communities and societies. In active solidarity and empowerment training, we carefully unravel those structures, gradually building a safe ground that can support us to explore these challenging themes step by step. Although the training content and process will address a wide range of discrimination and oppression structures, the main emphasis will be on how we can work with the dynamics that exist in groups and organisations.
The course content is not aimed at giving ready-made solutions but rather opening space for exploration, mutual learning and setting intentions for a long learning journey. Methods used during the course will invite participants to engage with emotional literacy work, embracing conditioned reactions to transform collective organising patterns.
The course focuses on individual and group level interventions, acknowledging the systemic nature of disempowerment and exclusion mechanisms.
The learning process will be held by facilitators using exercises and activities supporting self-reflection and self-evaluation around the following topics:
Participants will be invited to challenge their views and perspectives, be open, share from a place of personal experience and dive into explorations of the complexity of our identities, and how power and privilege play into these dynamics.
The course will be delivered in accessible, international English.
This training will take place in Kunbábony, Hungary
This venue is accessible for people with limited mobility.
Some travel bursaries will be available. There is no charge for the training, so economic difficulties should not prevent you attending!
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
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Baška (they/them) Facilitation, education, direct action and network building form the core of my life and work. Rooted in environmental science and climate justice organising, I am searching for ways to handle this mess of a world collectively, with the rage and kindness it requires. I am based in a Czech organisation Re-set: platform for socio-ecological transformation, where I am supporting collectives, cooperatives and groups in self-organising, learning and skill-sharing.
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Zsófi has been passionate about social and climate justice since her teenage years. She has been involved in Hungarian activism, focusing on economic democracy, mental health, and green sustainability. She volunteered during the founding of Hungary’s first green party and was a member of the Gólya Cooperative from its establishment. After leaving Gólya, she directed her energy toward supporting groups in forming more cooperatives and facilitating the development of existing ones. She served as the coordinator of the emerging Solidarity Economy Network at the Solidarity Economy Centre. Later, she collaborated with various network members, leading different projects on organizational development and horizontal decision-making. Additionally, she deepened her knowledge of community building through training and internships with the Global Ecovillage Network. Over the last five years, she has been one of the main organizers of the ‘Gyüttment’ sustainable knowledge-sharing festival, as well as organizing different green events such as summer universities, training sessions, and other festivals.
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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.
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Linzy Na Nakorn is a movement director, politicised somatics practitioner, community organiser and facilitator. For the past decade she has been facilitating movement, body work and creating theatre, dance and participatory performance that advocates for and organises with communities in pursuit of housing, disability and racial justice. Her movement practice focuses on trauma-informed approaches to building resilience, capacity and joy via way of the body for personal, interpersonal and community sustainability. Linzy was a Co-Director of The Big Ride for Palestine in partnership with The Gaza Sunbirds, Native Woman Ride and Middle East Children’s Alliance; using cycling as a tool for mobilising active solidarity and in support of campaigning for the rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. Linzy is part of a UK network of activists and artists advocating for Radical Care – supporting organisations, researchers and institutions to work towards system change in societal approaches to labour, leadership and access.
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Jeroen (he/him pronouns) has been involved in grassroots social movements for more than two decades now, starting back when he was fifteen. Throughout the years the fights for “climate justice” and “migrant justice” have been consistently on top of the list of struggles that make his heart beat faster. A key transformative moment for Jeroen was reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy gave him a language to support the creation of emancipatory learning environments, rooted in a desire for collective liberation. Jeroen has also been exploring in depth Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects among other methodologies to build his trainer’s toolkit. Inspired by the liberatory possibilities of these traditions, he started an organization with a friend, LABO vzw, based in Belgium, where he has worked as a trainer and campaigner between 2013 and 2023.
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Ella brings more than 10 years’ external experience working with not for profit and community based organisations across diverse themes including: advocacy for migrant communities; local community engagement in national policy making; and structural relationships between poverty and disenfranchisement, and education and poverty. Immersed in critical theory in her early 20s she brings a holistic and questioning approach, and is passionate about systemic solutions that centre relationship and interconnection between ecology and society. A long standing member of the collective, Ella has been part of the core team since the inception of the Ulex Project. Her work bridges facilitation, developing project partnerships, governance, strategy, operations, and project and programme evaluation. She has developed and overseen more than 70 partnerships with a range of different actors across European social movements.
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Alex has been facilitating courses geared towards social and personal transformation for the past 6 years. They have spent the last 10 years as a core member of the collective running the Ulex Project and has a deep experience of the integral approach we have developed. Their area of training expertise is sustainable activism and skills for developing ‘deeper resources’ for action. Their commitment to social justice and history of political activism have involved them in direct action and affinity group work focused on climate justice, anti-capitalism, queer politics and gender identity. A strong focus on the somatic dimension and embodied practice (informed by their work as a dance artist and yoga teacher) underpins both their approach.
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Nina (they/she) is a participatory artist, community organiser and political theatre maker. Theatre of the Oppressed has been a core part of their practice since they trained in India with Jana Sankriti in 2018. They are an artistic director of queer led theatre company, You Should see the Other Guy, who work on and off stage to tackle social injustice and make raucous musical verbatim plays. Nina has designed and delivered multiple TO training programmes in activist, community and academic settings, often combining TO with song making to collaboratively explore themes around power and identity. Their current fascination is thinking about TO as a practical manifestation of queer theory and asking: Is Theatre of the Oppressed queer?
Tools for effective and sustainable activism
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Navigating the complex terrain of migrant and migrant-solidarity organising
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an introduction to a holistic and transformative approach to activist training and facilitation
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Go to the people, learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have – Lao Tzu
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Building facilitation capacity through participatory practices.
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a space to think critically, to ask challenging and transformative questions, and find deeper inspiration and understanding to empower social change.
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building and strengthening regenerative praxis for BIPOC organisers.
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Basic tools, methods and approaches for dealing with group and relational conflicts.
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making our action count
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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.
