Skills and tools for strategy building that make our action count
There is a widespread sense across social movements today that, for all our effort, we’ve been losing ground for some time. Inspiring, courageous action is happening everywhere, but too often it doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts, and we often find ourselves on the back foot, responding to agendas set by our opponents rather than working within a strategic framework of our own choosing.
This training focuses on building the core skills of strategy: the ability to design and plan in ways that are effective, adaptable, and responsive to changing realities, at a scale genuinely capable of contributing to systemic change. Using hands-on, participatory, and experiential learning, we will work through the Strategy Cycle, learning to clarify vision and purpose, analyse context, map power, and develop the theories of change and critical pathways that can carry us from where we are to where we want to be. At this crucial time for our movements, focused, well-crafted, and well-informed strategising couldn’t be more important.
How do we better understand the role and significance of strategy at different levels (campaigns, organisational, and movements)? How do we develop strategies that are genuinely responsive and adaptive to the complexity and uncertainties of social change, while still moving decisively towards the futures we want to see?
This training is structured around the Strategy Cycle: a six-phase framework that gathers together the basic building blocks of a good strategy process — establishing vision and values, surveying the lie of the land, clarifying a theory of change, setting objectives and planning, taking action, and building in reflection and evaluation. We frame it as a cycle, not a one-off exercise, because strategy at this scale needs to be developed, tested and adapted continuously, as circumstances shift and our own understanding deepens.
We will spend time exploring each phase in turn, drilling down into its underlying logic and the skills, tools, and adaptations it calls for: from clarifying purpose and generating vision, through movement mapping and context analysis, to power mapping, theories of change, and the critical pathways and objectives that keep our plans honest and our action accountable. We’ll also explore what it takes to strategise well amid volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and how to make the whole process genuinely inclusive, collaborative and motivating for the people involved in it.
Bringing a strategic approach to our political work and movement building is no small thing. Influence within a social movement is distributed and hard to pin down; there is no command-and-control mechanism, no way to guarantee that others will act in any particular way, and the larger the scale of change we hope to influence, the harder it becomes to predict outcomes or feel confident our actions are making a difference. That doesn’t make strategy futile. It does mean we need frameworks flexible enough to hold that complexity, while thorough enough to make sure we’re not missing what matters.
This work asks a lot of us. It means looking honestly, and courageously, at the state of the world and our prospects for changing it, which can be demanding, and at times emotionally difficult, territory. But approached well, it can also leave us with our feet more firmly on the ground, and real traction, as we learn, together, to make the path by walking.
“What can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?” (Paulo Freire)
The structure will enable us to explore cutting-edge approaches to:
If you have any questions about this feel free to reach out to us at events@ulexproject.org.
Who is it aimed at?
Anyone involved in socially engaged action addressing ecological, political and social justice issues who is serious about taking a strategic approach to their work. Anyone fed up with always simply responding to the agenda set by those whose power we want to challenge. Anyone who recognises that building real transformative power requires a longer term and disciplined approach. Anyone who knows that resistance and building alternatives is the real secret of joy!. 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.
For accessibility and venue information see here.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
to apply
Location:
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.
Location:
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. They 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 their understanding of how productivity meets good working conditions meets overturning the food system meets resourcing the commons with resilient and democratically managed capital. These passions now underpin her multiple roles at Ulex; from team culture and coordination to training and writing funding applications.
Location:
Isa (she/her) is an educator, facilitator, and author. She grew up in France before setting off on an adventure to London, where she worked as a freelance journalist, French teacher, and administrator for a community arts organisation, all while writing her PhD on the concept of community. She became Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London (UK), where she taught for 10 years before leaving academia to breathe the air of freedom and collective action. She co-founded and co-facilitates, with Jay Jordan, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which has been bringing together artists and activists since 2004 to co-design and implement creative forms of direct action that are as joyful as they are politically effective. Active in social movements for over 20 years, she has facilitated assemblies of several hundred people, co-organised international mobilisations and climate camps, and trained thousands of people in reinventing forms of civil disobedience. Her passion is exploring collective dynamics and all the ways in which these can be made more fruitful, joyful, and caring, particularly through popular education and rituals. She has been involved with the zad in Notre Dame des Landes since 2016.
Location:
An Maeyens (she/her) is a facilitator and trainer with over two decades of experience in grassroots movements. She specialises in creative, inclusive agenda design and brings deep expertise on group culture, power dynamics, and transformative learning. Starting of in the anti-globalisation movement she has trained thousands in civil disobedience, supported international coalitions, and developed multilingual training programmes and toolkits. Her work spans movements, cultures, and countries, guided by a commitment to care, accessibility, and leaderful organising.
Location:
Ari’s activism began in 2002, at age 16, as a Bosnian refugee in Canada, where they founded and coordinated a group for LGBTIQ high school students and allies. They were a co-founder and leader at kolekTIRV in Croatia and Trans Network Balkan, involved in community organizing, advocacy, program management, team coordination, capacity building, education, media work, campaigns, events, fundraising, etc. In 2024, they joined the Supervisory Board of the Croatian Trade Union Collective of United Precarious Workers and Activists (SKUPA).
Beyond the Balkan region, Ari served as a Board member at Transgender Europe (TGEU), where they held roles as Secretary, Treasurer, and later Co-chair. They have also been a trainer with the Center for Artistic Activism and served on the Advisory Committee and since 2022 as a Community Care Facilitator at FRIDA — The Young Feminist Fund. Since 2024 they are the Operations Manager at Global Philanthropy Project.
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.
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.
