Transformative Organsing – Leaderful Organising

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15 to 22 November 2025

Go to the people, learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have – Lao Tzu

This training will share a framework for Leaderful Organising. It includes practices and understanding that can help organisations and groups to distribute power and leadership effectively. It offers an approach that addresses two related issues: the problems of leadership, that can lead to entrenched power interests, poor accountability, disempowerment, and traditional hierarchical structures, and; the problems of leaderlessness, where social movements and organisations, rejecting leadership adopt ‘horizontal’ structures in ways that can lack direction, continuity, and coherence.

It aims to address the challenges involved in bringing together the best aspects of leadership with the best aspects of more horizontal ways of organising, including a critique of both. The practices of leaderfulness draw on renewed and expanded notions of leadership, such as the idea of “group-centred leadership” articulated by Ella Baker, who was critical of a leadership style which tends to centralise power, decision making and responsibility for meaningful action in a single leader. She claimed that “Strong people don’t need [a] strong leader”.

Leaderfulness goes beyond leadership as merely the quality of individuals, to engender a culture of leaderfulness in which power is distributed appropriately and all members of an organisation or network are supported to grow into leaderfulness. In addition to supporting the acquisition of leadership qualities by individuals, a leaderful culture requires structures and systems that enable the distribution of power and influence – and nurture leaderfulness in us all. These structures and systems are rooted in the values of solidarity or what the systems scientist Donella Meadows calls ‘going for the good of the whole’.

 

The aims of the training are:

  • To support the building of collective power, agency, and leaderfulness in social movements, organisations and groups – working to achieve structural transformation to challenge ecological and socio-political injustice.
  • To understand and be able to apply the key principles of Leaderful Organising.
  • To create a space for collective reflection, analysis, and learning from participants’ experiences of social movement work across Europe.

 

More concretely, in this training we will explore ideas, develop skills and learn practices essential to Leaderful Organising related to:

  • Effective distribution of power and ability to work well with dynamics of privilege and inclusion
  • Methods that encourage participation and mutual empowerment
  • Forms of decision making that align with objectives and core values
  • The nurturing of group members’ capacity to offer diverse leadership contributions
  • Effective communication, including dialogue and empathic listening
  • Strategic development, including visioning and planning
  • Ongoing learning and reflection, providing responses and adaptive capabilities
  • Methods that ensure resilience and the sustainability of individuals and organisations
  • Systems to support effective coordination and collaboration.

We will create a space for learning that is shaped through collective reflection, analysis, and sharing of participants’ experiences from movements across Europe. The learning will include exploring practices for self-awareness in our own use of power, holding and distributing power, holding and sharing responsibilities, and other transformative leadership qualities. We will aim to create a temporary community where our efforts to embody the values and principles of leaderfulness create a space for lived transformative learning. 

 

Who is it aimed at?

Anyone involved in socially engaged action on environmental, political and social justice issues. 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.

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€300/€500/€1200

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Equipo

Equipo

Sergio

Germany

Location:

Germany

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.

Linzy Na Nakorn

Location:

Jeroen

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.

Ella

Location:

Alex Swain

Location:

Nina Scott

Location:

Próximos cursos

Nuestro nombre

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