Contact Us
To Apply
This is a training that offers a range of tools that can be used to help catalyse engagement within diverse communities. The participatory approaches it shares can be used to help people, communities and organisations engage in empowering dialogue, critical reflection and find motivation for decisive action.
We live in a time of ‘reflexive impotence’. Communication technologies bring the images and stories of world events into our lives in ever more Retina Screen™ detail in proportion to a growing sense of helplessness. We are all-too-well informed about the failings and irrationalities of our times. We’re deeply conscious of them – and often self-conscious of our complicity. And yet, ways to meaningfully influence what’s going on can seem elusive. All too often we resign ourselves, perhaps with some discomfort, to our part in it all, as onlookers. And yet, as Edmund Burke once wrote, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.”
The tools and approaches shared in this course will help organisers and activists support people to think more critically about their role in shaping society. They will enable you to bring communities together in inquiring and empowering dialogue with each other. They will give you more confidence to assist others to find the inspiration and courage to step up as active and critical citizens. These are crucial skills at a time when progressive values need to be defended and extended through vigorous engagement.
The training focuses on helping trainers and organisers to gain the skills and increase their confidence to facilitate and share participatory processes in diverse communities. Participatory approaches such as Theatre of the Oppressed, Popular Education and other experiential learning methodologies have been developed in the empowerment of communities across the world. The LABO team have been applying a spectrum of these methodologies amongst diverse communities in Belgium for many years. Here they share the tools they have found to be most useful in a wide range of pluralistic and multicultural settings.
In 2009, Mark Fisher wrote that for many people “the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizon of the thinkable.” This training provides tools and practices that can help us to reclaim the radical imagination and extend the horizon of the thinkable to include a life affirming and socially just future.
This course will be hosted at our sister centre, not far from the Ulex Project site, while we complete renovation work.
More details to follow soon.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
to apply
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.
Tools for effective and sustainable activism
–
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.
–
a space to think critically, to ask challenging and transformative questions, and find deeper inspiration and understanding to empower social change.
–
building and strengthening regenerative praxis for BIPOC organisers.
–
Ulex: del latín, (tojo en castellano, argelaga en catalán) nombre.
1. Arbusto espinoso de hoja perenne y floración, con gran capacidad de regeneración y resistencia. Sus púas se abren al entrar en contacto con el fuego y vuelve a brotar de los tocones carbonizados. Planta sucesional que crece bien en condiciones difíciles. Mejora la fertilidad del suelo mediante la fijación de nitrógeno, preparando el terreno para una renovada biodiversidad.
2. Una opción tradicional para encender fuegos. Arde con intensidad y brillo.
3. Un proyecto en red que aporta nutrición y fertilidad a los movimientos sociales europeos a través de la formación
