basic training in holistic and transformative facilitation approaches for groups and organisations.
Participating in our movements is demanding. For most of us, activist or movement-based work requires us to spend lots of time in groups, working with others, making decisions in inclusive ways, managing dynamics, integrating new people, and so on. That’s as it should be! We need broad-based, interconnected and participatory movements, and ways to build and strengthen alliances and involvement over time. But, as any of us who have tried it know, it’s not easy, and failures to do it well can lead to real movement loss, as people drop out, conflicts implode, inspiration and strategic direction wane, and burnout symptoms cycle on. Developing the skills that can support our groups and movements to function more helpfully, effectively and in alignment with our values is of huge importance.
This course is designed to support the development of some of those skills: the facilitation capacities that help groups and movements work well together and flourish over time.
Ulex Project courses apply an Integral Activist Training methodology. Recognising the interconnected nature of the personal, the interpersonal and the political, our work seeks to empower integrated transformation in all three spheres. This course is rooted in that approach, honouring and integrating its holistic, transformative, participatory and rooted-in-solidarity bases, but focuses on more basic skills than our established Integral Activist Training course. It aims to support those with little or no facilitation experience to feel more empowered and skilled to step into facilitation roles in activist and movement settings.
More on the Integral Activist Training approach here.
Good group process is one of the key and necessary capabilities of effective social movements. Achieving the kinds of social transformation we seek, and exemplifying and embodying the values we want to see in the world, is no easy task. We are constantly being asked to pay attention, adapt, include, articulate, act, withdraw, listen, connect, resist, support, make sense of, find resilience, manage divergence, hold complexity, and on and on. Doing all this well, in service to our broadest aims, requires phenomenal skill and the capacity to adapt and change. This is the role of facilitation. Being conscious about how we support ourselves, our groups and our movements to work well together is imperative.
Holding group processes requires a set of skills, tools and approaches which need to be context-specific, responsive to movement needs and aimed at systemic transformation. We understand facilitation in a very broad sense, from informal to more formal settings, from reflection through to action. Different kinds of facilitation will be needed and possible in different moments, circumstances and with access to different resources.
This course aims to equip activists with the basic frameworks needed for designing and facilitating processes in social movement spaces. It is designed to empower activists already embedded in movements to step into facilitation roles, and to help plan pathways to grow facilitation capacities in a context-relevant way.
The course seeks to offer approaches that are:
We will explore basic facilitation skills, approaches to working with participation and engagement, capacities for addressing power and privilege dynamics in groups, and considerations for designing and holding group processes, including adapting to different needs and ways of working. We will do so via a range of methods: dialogical, reflective, embodied, experiential, creative, didactic, relational and so on.
The course will aim to:
Main themes:
Anyone with experience in socially engaged action addressing ecological, political and social justice issues who wants to develop their facilitation capacities. We embrace a broad definition of activism that includes any form of contribution to change and social and ecological justice. That might include: 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)
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Cori is part of the Ulex team as a trainer, course organiser and coordinator. He is passionate about education and has been trained in various facilitation methods such as process work, theatre of the oppressed and NVC. After years of working with children and teenagers around topics such as sexual education or bullying awareness, he now devotes himself to training and accompanying activist groups. In addition to participating in several local organisations in the area where he lives, Cori loves supporting and maintaining caring communities. In this way, he puts most of his energy into making the beauty of life visible and strengthening the transformative potential of social movements.
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Ilaj’s background is in grassroots organising, involving them in various strands of social movement work for nearly two decades, mostly in Eastern and Southern Europe. In more recent years, they have turned their attention to broader European movement building as part of the Ulex core team, where they design programmes, coordinate training teams and facilitate on a wide range of training courses. Ilaj is an experienced trainer with a broad range of skills, particularly in holding space for collective exploration of burnout, weathering repression, navigating trauma and cultivating solidarity in social movements. They are passionate about working with body awareness as a radical means of deconstructing internalised systems of oppression. They have been exploring the intersection between transformative somatics and political organising for a number of years.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
