a space to think critically, to ask challenging and transformative questions, and find deeper inspiration and understanding to empower social change.
This is a one-week version of the Ecology of Social Movement training tailored to the context of Central and Eastern Europe. It is for experienced activists and organisers involved in movement level thinking and practice from the region. It is an opportunity to inquire deeply into how our organisations and networks relate to the wider ecology of activism within 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.
This training is part of the Ulex Central and Eastern Europe Programme. It is designed and delivered by a training team embedded in CEE social movements.
We are living in a time of multiple crises, in the presence of both great threat and potential. Neoliberal economic growth and traditional political models are in crisis, with a rising far right, growing inequality and violence, and intensifying ecological devastation. For the worst to be prevented and for something new to grow from the cracks of the old, our efforts to contest the future and build strategic alliances are crucial.
As with flora and fauna, our organisations exist within a much wider ‘movement ecology’ which includes many different networks and ways of taking action, multiple histories and different ways of showing up in many different places. Understanding ourselves in this wider context helps us to think more clearly about our specific contributions, what others offer, and what wider possibilities might exist. We will explore our own movement practice and ecologies to develop creative strategies for social transformation.
All too often there is a huge gap between the scale of the problems we are responding to and the limits of a single organisation. At times we may see that, though the actions we have taken hold some importance, still they do not achieve the effects we want or expect. All this can lead us into loss of hope, cynicism or burnout. Ecology of Social Movements helps us to find strategic ways forward – to strengthen resilience for hard times and difficult places, to rethink our organisations’ situation and tactics, find unexpected allies, explore new initiatives, think differently about movement strategy – and be in a space with others that deeply honours that we cannot do everything on our own.
How can we develop more powerful and effective alliances, across different organisations, social situations, places and issues that can allow us to genuinely change the situation and win against powerful opposition? How can our own organisations become more effective as part of a wider whole? And how can we find a path to social change grounded in solidarity, cooperation and creativity, despite our differences?
We will explore:
Learning from each other’s struggles
This course uses carefully chosen tools and theories that we have found are highly useful for organisers in supporting their work to become more effective, better networked and able to contribute to deeper social change. The course supports a shared process of deepening reflection and learning in a community of exploration. Orientating in this collective, strategic way, sits beside a commitment to emancipatory and radical learning. With the experience and knowledge we bring from this strand of our work, we hold the course design in a flexible and responsive way, focusing on shaping content for participants’ learning needs and creating space to hear and learn from one another.
Importantly, this enables us to learn from each other’s struggles. We don’t have to rely only on limited experience within our single organisations, or indeed mainstream sources, to support our problem solving. Course participants and trainers bring a rich and wide variety of movement experience and possibilities into the room. When we spend proper time with our peers from different movements, countries, social situations and traditions, and really listen, we can learn a huge amount about the choices for how and why to organise in the ways we do. We get perspective on our own approaches and build our capacities to work more effectively across our many differences and across distance.
The team is made up of experienced activists and movement trainers. We will make every effort to work across language barriers, to support those who may feel intimidated or alienated by the idea of formal learning spaces, to work carefully and proactively with challenges or conflicts that may arise in the group, address experiences of oppression, and actively support those in marginalised positions. We see this work as a core aspect of the practical movement learning we are doing, in the struggle for social change and to create new ways of relating to one another in that struggle.
At Ulex we aim to practice holistically, engaging the body and emotions as well as the mind, learning through experiential processes as well as discussion and analysis, using small-group spaces and problem-oriented learning, honouring and emphasising relationship and deep listening in a space of practical solidarity. We hope this enables the meeting of the wider range of backgrounds, characters and learning styles present in these groups, as well as contributing to a richer, more enjoyable experience.
Ecology of Social Movements is a Ulex flagship course. We have run various versions of it and in various contexts, since 2018 and it has been a key inspiration for the Movement Learning Catalyst project – our year long training programme.
Who is it aimed at?
This course is aimed at anyone involved in engaged action on environmental, political and social justice issues coming from Central-Eastern Europe. We embrace a broad definition of activism, including: Resistance – action preventing further damage to ecosystems and social justice; Renewal – action focused on developing and creating alternatives for healthier societies and communities; and Building Resilience – action supporting increased resilience in communities to weather the uncertain times ahead.
Participants should:
The main spoken language on the course will be English.
This training will take place in Kunbábony, Hungary
This venue is accessible for people with limited mobility.
This training is offered in the solidarity economy. You do not need to contribute financially to attend. Contact us if you need a travel bursary – we might be able to offer it.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
to apply
Location:
Marika (she/they) is organizer, trainer and facilitator in the climate justice movement in Czech republic. After being involved in grassroot group Limity jsme my for 5 years and organizing several climate camps, she moved to the coal region in Northern Bohemia, where she organizes local communities for just transition from fossil fuels. She worked in Re-set: platform for social-ecological transformation around the topics of divestment from fossil fuels, energy poverty and community energy. She is co-founder of a social housing cooperative, which runs a community center. As a trainer, she takes part in trainings focused on capacity building in grassroots movements, just transition, community organizing or facilitation. Apart from that, Marika is passionate about mushroom growing, picking wild herbs and gardening.
Location:
(he/him) has spent the last 25 years in and around the Hungarian social movement and alternative education scenes, taking various roles. Originally trained as a teacher of English, he first became involved in Outward Bound’s outdoor team buildings. He then went on to become co-founder of the green activist youth organisation Zöfi, then co-founder of the local Transition Towns initiative in Wekerletelep, Budapest and trainer of the Transition Movement. He joined the Hungarian green party LMP in 2009 and spent 10 years as a local councillor.
He is presently working as an electrician at Gólya, a workers’ cooperative in Budapest.
Location:
Lives in Berlin, where used to work for European Youth for Action (EYFA) supporting groups from the office, today is still part of its network. Right now actively supports right to abortion. Mo was a member of the polish trainer’s collective SPINA, where skilled themselves in various topics and delivered workshops, facilitated groups processes and created materials. Published a book about genderbending.
Location:
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.
Location:
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.
Location:
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.
Location:
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.
Location:
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.
Location:
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?
new stories: different worlds
–
Knowledge, skills and perspectives to challenge oppression and create spaces of solidarity.
–
Tools for effective and sustainable activism
–
Navigating the complex terrain of migrant and migrant-solidarity organising
–
an introduction to a holistic and transformative approach to activist training and facilitation
–
Go to the people, learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have – Lao Tzu
–
Building facilitation capacity through participatory practices.
–
building and strengthening regenerative praxis for BIPOC organisers.
–
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.