building and strengthening regenerative praxis for BIPOC organisers.
This workshop is designed to address the specific needs, challenges, and lived realities of BIPOC activists and organisers. We will explore the relationship between identities and burnout, asking how our positionality as BIPOC activists shapes our capacity, resilience, and engagement in social change work. By creating a space shared with others who hold similar lived experiences, we aim to foster collective reflection on the specific pressures we face—and explore how we can support ourselves and one another to not only survive but thrive in our work.
Those of us involved in social change face enormous challenges. Daily we meet injustice, loss, and suffering in the world around us, as well as in our personal lives and our own experiences of systemic racial injustice. We also meet our own responses, our fears, frustrations and anger. How can we best work with these responses creatively? Where can we find the personal resources and skills that could make our action more effective and sustainable? How can we take care of ourselves and our own needs as BIPOC activists? And what collective tools might we use to enable our groups, organisations, and networks to better embody our values and our marginalised perspectives?
We use the term regenerative intentionally, aiming not just for sustainability but for transformation – drawing inspiration from permaculture and ecological thinking, where systems are designed to renew and revitalise themselves over time. Our organising spaces can be life-affirming – places where we flourish as individuals and collectives, and where we embody the justice and care that we are inspired to realise in the world.
This course draws on holistic and participatory approaches, including popular education, ecological and systems thinking, and reflective practices. It will bring together BIPOC activists from across Europe to share experiences, deepen their practice, and strengthen transnational networks of solidarity and support.
What are the aims of the course?
So, the workshop will help participants to:
Who is it aimed at?
Anyone identifying as a BIPOC activist or organiser. 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 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:
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:
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.
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.
–
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
