new stories: different worlds
“It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.”
—Ben Okri, Author
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.
We witness the power of narrative and story on a daily basis. Division and hatred are spread by the rightwing press and politicians. The issues of the day are quickly framed on social media. Historical stories provide deep undercurrents of understanding of our national and global psyches. And, within this ecosystem, our movements are also telling stories of need and despair, hope and change: think Greta and the school strikers, Strajk Kobiet, or the Movement for Black Lives.
But how can we be sure that the stories we are telling—the way we are communicating the issues we care about—are effective? How do we know that they are catching people’s attention, engaging, motivating, building our movements, and ultimately bringing about change?
This training will focus on the role of framing in our work on social and environmental justice.
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.
In this training we’ll explore the process for developing effective narratives. We’ll demystify the terms around story, framing and narrative and take a whistle-stop tour through the theory behind the framework. And we’ll move through the process of developing a vision, understanding the narrative landscape, and creating and testing new routes through this landscape.
In detail, the training will cover:
Developing vision
Understanding the narrative landscape
Developing new frames
Testing frames
The training will be participatory and practical throughout.
Participants can expect to gain:
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.
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.
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Jakub (he/him) works at the interface between social movements, academia, and non-formal education. His journey began at anti-fascist blockades, later he became involved in the climate justice movement and the Limity jsme my movement organizing climate camps in Czech coal regions. Those included both collective education and direct actions against fossil fuel infrastructure. Alongside this, he worked for several years as a youth worker training on the tools of activism and political organizing. Nowadays, he develops material and curriculums relevant to the CEE context in the trainers platform for social- ecological transformation. On the academic front, Jakub delves into studies on social- ecological resilience, focusing on the exchange of knowledge(s) and practices among different actors.
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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?
Knowledge, skills and perspectives to challenge oppression and create spaces of solidarity.
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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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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.
