Movement Learning Catalyst Year-Long Programme (Movement Learning Catalyst: A Year+ Programme)

Key programme elements

The programme is more than a training. It is designed as a transversal movement building project – connecting different struggles and communities across issues, strategic approaches, and localities. The course places action-learning, deep ongoing reflection, and building solidarity-based relationships at its core.

Themes

– Transnational organizing and movement building across geographies, countries, cultures.

– Transversal organizing and movement building across different movement issues and organising traditions

– Social movements and social change: Understanding movement histories, case studies, political analysis, reflection and learning in movements

– Solidarity and alliance building between organisations and movements: Intersectional practices, anti-oppression, psycho-social resilience and sustainability

– Strategy in complex and changing contexts: Strategy and complexity, power analysis, strategic orientations to crisis.

Learning activities

This programme will be designed with you and tailored to your context and needs. It starts from the challenges your movement or organisation is facing related to transversal and/or transnational organising in a specific project or initiative. You will be able to select among multiple learning components and resources online and offline to support your learning needs.

These include:

• Action Learning Accompaniment: We will provide a structured action-learning process including elements of research support, action-reflection circles, and coaching.
• On-line Modular Curriculum and Seminars: Online seminars or workshops on different topics with live and asynchronous elements. You could select the ones relevant to your needs.
• International Residential Trainings: We will offer in-person residential trainings connected to Ulex Project’s Ecology of Social Movements training.
• Regional Gatherings: We will offer in-person learning opportunities through short regional gatherings based on the geographical spread of participants.
• Peer-to-Peer Learning Circles: We will create circles of 5-6 participants and provide a structured space for ongoing inquiry and reflection into live issues and current practice using a peer coaching method and a forum space.
• Visits: We will support participants to visit each other in different settings to get a clearer sense of diverse working contexts and cultures.
• Personal Mentoring: We’ll offer one-to-one mentoring where requested, with regular check-ins, either in person regionally or virtually.

Who is it for?

The programme is for a group of 40-60 experienced activists, organisers, and trainers based in Europe who:

• Have substantial personal history of social movement engagement and experience to share with each other
• Are embedded in organisations or networks that can benefit from thinking strategically about their place in social movements, and well placed to bring new learning back to their organisations or movements
• Recognise the importance of developing our capabilities to organise transversally and transnationally, across multiple forms of difference within and between our movements
• Care about developing social movement alliances on a scale capable of winning

Applications are welcome from anyone fulfilling the broad criteria listed above. We very much welcome participants who have done previous trainings in this direction (transversal / transnational alliance building). We will select participants from diverse movements and contexts across Europe to share and learn from each other.

Application and timeframe

Participants will need to commit to engage in the following programme activities from December 2022 to December 2023:

• October to December 2022: Recruiting participants, conducting needs analysis, and refining the programme based on participants’ needs and experience
• January to December 2023: 12-month core action learning programme
• 2024 and beyond (optional): We hope to build on the community created and expand the action-learning and organising network.

Cost and Solidarity Economy

We’ll operate the programme in the spirit of a Solidarity Economy and we’re committed to challenging economic marginalisation and exclusion. We want to enter into relationship with you as co-producers and collaborators in the joint project of movement building. There will be no charge for any elements of the programme. We will ask all participants or their sending organisations to consider making a financial contribution towards the running costs of the programme in the range of €500/€1500/€4000. Where activities involve travel and other costs, if participants or organisations can cover these costs themselves, we ask that they do so. However, inability or unwillingness to make a contribution will not preclude anyone from participating. Where participants cannot cover costs, we will engage in fundraising, aiming to help create bursaries to help cover these costs.

Who is going to run it?

The programme development is being led by the Ulex Project in close partnership with the European Community Organising Network, the National University of Ireland Maynooth, and European Alternatives. We will draw on the pool of trainers connected with these organisations to provide training elements, action learning facilitation, and accompaniment/mentorship.

A longer description of the programme can be found here.