It’s so important to make the time to pause and take stock in our work. To give real importance to the space for reflection – on outcomes, achievements, challenges, questions, uncertainties, enjoyment, all that stuff – making sure we are staying alive to the core of our mission and doing our work in a way that aligns with our values. Along with the necessity of this in supporting effective evaluative and visioning processes, it’s also so important to take the time to absorb and celebrate the successes and positive outcomes of the work we’ve all been doing. Loads happened at Ulex this year! We thought we’d share a few of those highlights with you. Here goes…
OUR PROGRAMME
As you are probably aware, we run a pretty full programme of courses designed to strategically and responsively empower social movements. We aim to help facilitate a space for deep thinking, mutual support, and honouring diversity, to foster solidarity and deep personal resourcing, as well as offering innovative tools and approaches. We build strategic partnerships with organisations working in all sorts of areas of social change (more on that below). Then, through processes of ongoing review and development around what partners in different corners of Europe need from a training space like ours, we try to design our programmes in a way that responds to these needs.
In 2024 that looked like: Running a bunch of trainings tailored to the Central and Eastern European context, trainings like Rethinking CEE Legacy or Holistic Security & Protection for CEE. We ran a number of versions of our signature trainings – three Transformative Collaboration courses, and five Regenerative Activism: Sustainable Organising courses including one for LGBTQ+ activists and one for BIPOC organisers. We ran courses on Strategy, on Leaderfulness, on Framing and Narrative, on Transformative Organising. We ran training in Radical Nature Connection, Transforming Conflict and Imagining Real Utopias. We ran some Active Solidarity courses, some Ecology of Social Movements courses and a couple of Integral Activist Training for Trainer courses, plus a Trainers Gathering. Some courses took place in Hungary, some in Catalunya and some of the bespoke courses for partners were run ‘on location’.
We worked with around 500 learners as part of our core programme, and with attendance from more than 50 countries. This amounts to something like 4480 hours of course day participations and 26,880 learning hours delivered. On top of this, and coming out of other aspects of our project work, we trained or facilitated learning spaces for around 400 people in person or online.
We have seen the development of two new strands of programme work this last year, the CEE programme mentioned above, and the Argelaga development. A little more on those…
Central and Eastern European Programme
The establishment of this project has been a major strategic development in the last year, growing out of our commitment to address context specific needs. Since the initial CEE tour we undertook, establishing relationships and network connections with key actors, we’ve had this regional focus in view. In 2024 we made a good start setting up and running the pilot year – 6 trainings and around 80 participants – generating real enthusiasm and commitment from the emerging CEE trainer pool. Sofia, one of our Hungary based project coordinators has reflected–
“This programme has made it clearer to me how different the learning needs are in the region, partly I think, due to a poor and very formal or narrow basic education we received, and because of the socially inherited attitude toward solidarity, in terms of being the first generation after the fall of the Soviet Union. Previously, I was always thinking that things are just going extremely bad in Hungary because of its bad luck, or I blamed the overall characteristics of people. Since we are getting deeper and deeper in understanding the specific, complex economical, political, and geographical situation that impacts Eastern Europe, I am finding I have more trust and optimism towards ourselves.”
The team have been working on the adaptation of core pedagogy and content to the CEE context and have made some good headway with this. We’ll continue to work on this in the coming year with an ongoing action-reflection approach, moving toward the project becoming independent of Ulex as soon as that’s viable.
Argelaga
Of course Spanish social movements are also not immune from challenges that undermine power and buoyancy and we have seen needs around fatigue, frustration and fragmentation in this area for years (amongst lots of good work too!). In 2024, three of our Catalan- and Spanish-speaking facilitators started ‘Argelaga’ (this is the Catalan word for ‘ulex’, or ‘gorse’ in English), a really exciting development allowing us to begin to more strategically strengthen our connections with activists and organisations working closer to us. We’ve been working to engage closer local networks, unions and specific campaign groups, running some trainings for XR Spain, The Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), Sindicat de Llogateres and a collection of Feminist groups in Pallars.
“Urgency leaves little time for reflection, for understanding the inertia in which movements are caught, for discerning what is useful and what is not, so it is important to create spaces for listening and healing among people in collectives”
says Cori, one of the Argelaga trainers, who’s been working in Catalan and Spanish movements for years. So we’re helping these organisations create spaces for reflection, breaking cycles of habitual action and looking at themes of resilience, strategy and so on. The events have been really well attended and received. Next up is a weekend training on Regenerative Activism in Barcelona at the end of March.
PARTNERSHIPS
Underpinning all of our capacity building work lies the crucial task of building and strengthening relationships – within groups, between organisations, and across movements. We take a broad and strategic view of social change, aiming to extend the impact of our work with people working at all levels: from bigger NGOs and trade unions, to smaller organisations and grassroots collectives.
In 2024 we kept this up and saw the formation of many new and positive partnerships with organisations tackling a wide range of social, environmental, and political terrain. We worked with organisations who support grassroots movements through building strategic alliances, redistributing finance and skill sharing; organisations addressing working conditions and building revolutionary reforms in anti-violence and anti-discrimination in education; those working on ecological advocacy; youth mobilisation; demystifying economics and social inequalities; offering training and counselling support for LGBTQ+ movements; emergency responses and community building for migrants and refugees; and with a wide range of tactics at play, from striking and civil disobedience to local community organising and educational interventions. We worked with partners in Germany, Hungary, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Slovakia, Italy, Croatia, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta, Austria, Ireland, Denmark, Czechia and more!
We established and worked with something like 50 new or re-kindled partners in 2024, not including the looser connections made to organisations through all the individuals we’ve worked with. It’s great to be strengthening and widening these networks year on year, strategically, but also to feel the sense of solidarity and strength in being part of such a wide and diverse movement. There is so much good work being done in so many places! We are looking to begin to diversify the ways we work with and support partners going forward, particularly through Accompaniment processes – more on that below.
PROJECTS AND RESOURCES
On top of the ongoing running of our ever adapting core programme and partnership building, we’ve been putting energy into a bunch of other projects and resource developments in the past year. We thought we’d share a few of them with you (and we might share more about them in some of our coming newsletters as things develop further…).
Movement Learning Catalyst: Year Long Programme and Resource Manual
As part of the broader MLC project – an initiative launched in 2021 in collaboration with Maynooth University Ireland, European Alternatives and the European Community Organizing Network, developing learning support for building the impactful social movement alliances required to achieve necessary depths of structural transformation (more on this here) – in 2023/2024 we ran the first MLC year-long, blended training programme. We had 15 participants commit to this process with us as a core group with around 80 participating in more specified ways. The programme included ongoing Action-Learning accompaniment sessions to develop movement practice; online modular curriculum learning, seminars, in-person residential training courses, regional gatherings, peer learning circles, personal mentoring/coaching; and so on. It was great to have the opportunity to work with people over a longer learning arc, get to know each other and our struggles better, build relationship and strategy in a reflexive, cumulative and nuanced way. We’ve been wanting to develop these kinds of longer, joined up programmes for years, and we learnt loads! We’ll be aiming to build on this with similar programmes in the coming years.
We shared the MLC Guide to Learning for Systemic Change resource manual with you in our last newsletter, but here it is again in case you missed it (or didn’t manage to get through the whole 189 pages of it 😉 ).
Learning from Latin America
Inspired by research on issues raised through our Ecology of Social Movements training and the MLC, Carol Marin and Maria Llanos have been working on a project called Learning from Latin America: Creating a Common Front. The project explores the experiences of activists from the Uruguayan Frente Amplio in their building of broad-based progressive alliances and strong relationships between social movements and other institutional actors since 1971 and up to today. We have been working on a six-video series of interviews which we hope will offer a basis for reflection, study and inspiration to European activists. It includes conversations with some of those involved since the organisation was founded, as well as the younger generation of activists who have been helping to address the ongoing challenges and criticisms involved in a collective political practice lasting over 50 years and leading through to their entering government – and now for the third time following recent elections.
These videos will be published this spring and, once this happens, we’ll be convening communities of inquiry to reflect on and explore the material more deeply. Watch this space!
PODER Project and Training Toolkit
PODER – Power Dynamics in Education Revisited – was a project run in collaboration with Universidade do Porto, Giolli Coop Italy, Artemisszio Hungary and Élan Interculturel France, aiming to explore the challenges around power relations in educational spaces, and establish some of the perspectives and tools needed to support the development of transformative and ‘brave’ learning environments.
We looked at relations between facilitators and learners as well as different positionalities (age, race, class, etc) and the ways training cultures, languaging, course design and structure, and facilitator skills impact the experience of power differentials and empowerment. We also produced a bunch of training activities for application to different training contexts in support of building braver spaces and produced a short series of videos looking at some of the core skills required to do this work effectively, as facilitators and educators. The reach of this project was huge, with thousands of learners engaging with the content through in-person and online trainings, events, and social media promotion across all four countries.
You can download the trainer toolkit here and you can watch the brilliant video series here.
Resilience Support and Accompaniment Programme
Last year we were asked by an international NGO (who shall remain nameless!) to take on the training and accompaniment of a range of 15 social/environmental justice organisations, from the US to Romania, Ukraine and Palestine, who had indicated a need for mental health and wellbeing support. Our methodologies are generally holistic and integrative – we approached this in a way that tried to look at the ‘personal’, organisational and wider social impacts on resilience, going through an extensive process of needs assessment and designing a bespoke approach for each organisation. This involved some in-person residential trainings, on location training and accompaniment in places of work, some on-line training, and a lot of one-to-one or small group mentoring and coaching.
Alex, one of the coordinators on the project said,
“It was really positive to be able to go through a process that could be so thorough and personalised. I’ve been working on the resilience strand of Ulex’s work for a decade – it’s really familiar to me – and I’m usually working with folk in the context of a 9 day training with a bit of follow up. To have a whole year of set up, exploration, digging down into tendencies, motivations, personal dimensions, collective dimensions and team challenges.. all that was really fulfilling and helped me deepen my love for this work… and see how much organisations still really need it!”
As one of the participants succinctly put it: “You’re doing such a good job! I think that many organisations would benefit from this training, I hope you will keep doing this for a long time!” – so there’s a glowing endorsement for ya!
NEW DEVELOPMENTS
Accompaniment Work
In recent years we’ve had an increasing demand for more focused support in individual teams and organisations. Beyond our usual core programme approach, we are seeing now that processes of more ongoing accompaniment feel essential to supporting the embedding and deepening of learning with partners in general. It’s not enough to simply have activists come on a training or two – we want to be able to support more iterative change at whole group level and this requires longer action learning cycles with groups.
Ella, one of our core team members, has been leading this development following many years facilitating on our Transformative Collaboration strand and after completing a year long training based in Group Analytics and Systems Psychodynamics at the Tavistock Institute. As usual, we’re approaching this holistically, drawing on material developed in several of our core trainings, alongside aspects of systems theory, ecosystems leadership frameworks, psychosocial resilience approaches, and Frierian pedagogy.
Over the last year (and a bit further back too) we’ve been working with organisations for periods of 2 to 24 months. The support needed has been varied: from working through conflict and stuckness; team dynamics and decision making parameters; setting up whole new governance structures; strategic planning; and one to one support for people in leadership or high pressure roles.
Ella says one of the best things about it “is the ability to get under the surface of an issue and really learn alongside people as they work through their questions and challenges as a group together. It’s a different kind of engagement to a training setting. I never come at it with the idea that I will have the ‘answers’ to a group’s challenge or need. In fact I often feel off the peg solutions have a limited amount to offer. But I can observe and ask questions that the group might not ask themselves – either because of habit, or discomfort, or being too close to the subject – and by doing so and holding what it opens up with care and patience and curiosity we can find the pathway forward together. I learn something new with each interaction and this ongoing learning supports me to keep feeding ideas and curiosity back into the ecosystem”.
We are currently primarily focused on offering accompaniment support to a number of core partner organisations who have planned long term capacity building training programmes with us. This dual approach of training and accompaniment will hopefully ensure action learning methodologies are more deeply embedded for critical social movement actors to support their resilience in the months and years ahead. This new aspect of strategy feels really promising!
Team News
Last but not least a bit of team news for you. In 2024 we’ve had 3 new members join the team – Finn and Isobel as grant project coordinators, and Cori as events organiser and coordinator plus Argelaga facilitator. We also recently have Sofia working with us as a coordinator on the CEE programme. We said a fond goodbye to An as a core team member (she’ll keep working with us as a facilitator) as she went off to join an exciting project focused in South America with 350.org, and to Ziska who is now working for GEN Spain, but supporting us still with a bit of freelance work. What else?? Alex had a baby, Onyango is getting ready to have a baby, and Gee did the gradual work required to support him to go on a year long sabbatical due to begin at the end of 2024. In reality he is only fully getting going with that now – turns out 15 years of centre and programme directing is quite difficult to tie up! We are really pleased to be in a position to support him to take this time for pause and reflection, as we’ve done for other team members over the years, and look forward to welcoming him back in a year’s time along with the fruits of the time away.
So that’s all the good news. Of course that’s not the whole picture. We’ve encountered plenty of challenges and things we need to work on over the year as well. The continuing work of trying to enable white dominated spaces to become more accessible and useful for global majority/BPOC participants; the pressures of extensive funding requirements and the ongoing need to strategise around all that for a resilient team; the complexities of growing as an organisation – distributing power and influence, adapting our structures, optimising effectiveness while holding to values, to name just a few significant examples. And still, in the spirit of celebration and honouring successes, we feel it’s been a great year and, amongst the expected (sometimes painful) challenges of running a busy organisation, working collectively and trying to respond to some heavy sh*t on the global stage, we continue to be so grateful for the efforts, support and energy of people from all over, who contribute to this work of social transformation.
Huge thanks for everything you do and here’s to a collaborative, committed and courageous 2025!