Movement Learning Catalyst Strategy Training

2 to 9 Dec 2023

developing longer term and responsive strategies for deep social transformation

 

The training will be integrated with the Movement Strategy Module of the MLC year+ programme.

We aim to create a space to think critically, to ask challenging and transformative questions, and to find deeper inspiration and understanding to empower social change. It will support us to learn from each other’s struggles and experience, combining new analytical frameworks, deep reflective inquiry, and applied learning.

 


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.

We’ll explore themes including:

  • Social movements and important social change today and in the past
  • Transformative strategy and transformative ambition
  • Revisiting the ecology of movements in the context movement strategy
  • Learning from complex living systems
  • Applying VUCA skills (for working and strategizing under conditions that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) to movement strategy

The event will be designed to complement the Movement Strategy module of the year-long Movement Learning Catalyst Programme.

Preparation and follow up

The course will be designed to integrate with the Movement Strategy Module and some additonal preparatory reading and reflection mayt be required, as well as some participation in a forum with co-participants. Similarly follow up process will help us to continue to share our learning with each other as we carry our learning back into our day to day work.

Venue

The training will take place at the Ulex Project centre in Catalunya.

Suggested Contribution
In the solidarity economy: €400/€700/€1200
(see the details of our approach to Solidarity Economics for details)

The Team

Our Name

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.