G has been involved in social movement organising and education since the late 1980’s. He is a highly regarded trainer and has designed numerous training programmes covering areas such as psychosocial resilience in activism, the ecology of social movements, and leaderful organising. As a founding member of the Ulex Project, he is known for highly innovative work blending pedagogical methodologies. This holistic approach to activist learning has inspired numerous training initiatives across Europe. He currently steers the strategic development of the Ulex Project and its social movement capacity building programme.

Hilal Demir, a cook, an artist and a DJ at home. A nonviolent trainer, facilitator for 20 + years with lots of experience on nonviolence and related topics such as organizing, conflict management , nonviolent action, understanding power, resilience, strategy etc. She is passionate about leading informal learning experiences, community organizing, group dynamics and supporting activists and organizations to build long lasting healthy social movements for a just future. As a nonviolent queer-feminist activist she has been instrumental in creating organizations and groups in Turkey committed to spreading nonviolent culture.

Steve has 20 years of experience working as a community, union, and political organizer in both the United States and Europe. He currently lives in Prague, and works on several trans-European and transatlantic organizing initiatives. Tracing his roots to the US labor movement, he made the transition to political organizing in 2010 when he went to work for the Working Families Party (WFP). In 2014 he moved to Europe, but he continues to support US-based organizing at the WFP, and has also taken a leadership role in developing the European Community Organizing Network, a hub for the community organizing sector in Europe. He has developed a community of practice with the organizers and movement educators of the Grassroots Power Project, a movement support organization founded with the goal of shifting community organizing practice towards less-siloed, more transformative approaches. In this role he serves as a link between the US and European organizing sectors.

Working from Utrecht, the Netherlands, Pelle Berting builds movements for social and ecological justice. After an MA in Conflict Studies & Human Rights, he started out as conflict transformation trainer and method developer. Realizing the climate crisis threatens the foundations for peace and justice, he entered a life of climate activism. Working as community mobiliser at Greenpeace Netherlands and through other engagements, he helped catalyze the climate justice movement and became skilled at campaign development, coalition-building, mobilisation, organising and (mass) action. Always helping people find their role, supporting grassroots initiative, bridging different movement perspectives, and building trust, leadership, and solidarity. In recent years, he gravitated more and more towards issues of land justice – land rights, ecosystem restoration, the commons, and agro-ecology. His current role at Greenpeace is to grow the agro-ecology movement in the Netherlands and beyond.

Paul is a mediator, facilitator and trainer, with a depth of experience  supporting groups through conflict, difficult decision making and the process of developing their systems and ways of working together. He is focused on supporting groups and projects who are working for social and environmental justice, and has also worked as a community mediator. Paul is part of the Navigate collective and is based in England. He draws on a number of approaches in his work (including Restorative Circles, Convergent Facilitation, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), Aikido and others), and is currently exploring ways to draw on these processes and principles to support movement building specifically. He is passionate about helping people to come together, organise collective power and find ways forward that genuinely work for all.

María worked for the Red Cross in community development, strengthening civil society, education, and food security in Latin America and Africa. Building on her studies in social psychology and international development, she studied Alternative Economics at Schumacher College, UK. This led her into work on organisational change with NGOs and grassroots movements. María specialises in complexity and participation applied to organisations: organisational structures and culture, emergent strategy, leadership amongst others. She co-founded The Eroles Project, a learning for action project and La Bolina, a systemic project looking at repopulation, inclusion and agroecology. María´s co-authored: Small is Important: Learnings from an integration and regeneration Project.  Factores Clave para la Acción Reflexión Colaborativa, Enfoques y herramientas participativas en la cooperación al desarrollo, Activism and spirituality.

Tashy Endres has 18 years of experience in movements for social and spatial justice. This includes long-standing involvements in the movement of unemployed and landless workers in Buenos Aires, Occupy Wall Street in New York City, Decolonizing Architecture in Bethlehem, Kotti & Co (a tenants initiative in the Berlin social housing system), Berlin Rent Referendum and the Jumpstarting Working Group of Expropriating Deutsche Wohnen & Co in Berlin, which she/they co-founded and is currently active in. Tashy works as a political educator, facilitator, trainer and strategy coach in social movements and political organisations in the fields of transformative (community) organizing, social justice and critical diversity, nonviolent communication and conflict transformation through an intersectional lense as well as regenerative organizing and activism.

Meera is an activist, facilitator and community builder. After 2 decades of working in activism and non-profit work on climate justice, racial equity, children’s rights, and human rights across her native Pakistan and now home Europe, Meera realized that we can’t move the needle on the things that matter if we don’t take the time to heal our relationships with each other. This led Meera down the path of developing her theory and praxis around what she calls a Culture of Care. Her goal in this work is to see people, communities, and movements become greater by centering empathy and building systems of accountability, support and care. She’s had a long and varied career, doing everything from community organizing, to guiding non-profits through policy, visioning and strategic planning processes, to negotiating with the United Nations, to scoping and booking indie bands for green musical festivals. Her proudest professional accomplishment has been doing this much-needed work of creating work environments and spaces where people can be their whole selves. Her work as a grassroots activist and community organiser has given her keen insight into what leads to transformative change. She takes an intersectional feminist lens when developing and delivering solutions.

Kyle Sawyer (they/he) is an anti-oppression facilitator and educator specializing in working with individuals and organizations on how to turn privilege into change. He is a trans, queer, mixed-race, white-passing individual. With over a decade of experience Kyle founded Building Allies in 2013 and developed the term Active-Ally, someone who witnesses injustice and responds to it in any situation. Kyle has worked with teachers, nonprofit organizations, students, therapists, social workers, community members, family members, and many others on learning how to be Active-Allies through an intersectional lens.

Neus has been passionate about education since she was 8 years old and went dumpster diving in teachers’ recycling bins for worksheets to help other students learn at break-time. She moved from Castellon to Scotland to study Community Education, with a focus on youth work and adult education, where she co-founded The New Leaf Co-op, a successful workers’ co-op in Edinburgh. Whilst there Neus developed her understanding of how productivity meets good working conditions meets overturning the food system meets resourcing the commons with resilient and democratically managed capital. This passion now underpins her project coordination role at Ulex.