The Ulex Project will provide the best in social movement training for activists, change makers, and organisations.
The programme:
• a core of signature trainings exemplifying Integral Activist Training
• showcasing best practice from invited trainers and collectives
• fostering innovation and communities of inquiry
• responsive design and bespoke trainings
signature trainings
We’ve been innovating and developing trainings for social movements for many years. Our work has informed and inspired training initiatives across Europe and is informed by what we call Integral Activist Training. The signature trainings draw on the best of that work. Amongst these trainings you’ll find our highly respected work on sustainability and resilience for activists and groups, cutting edge courses on effective and transformative collaboration, as well as innovative applications of deeper reflective and contemplative approaches to empower social agency.
• Sustainable Activism: range of trainings that offer tools and skills for sustaining ourselves and building resilient organisations.
• Transformative Collaboration: These courses explore the challenges of working with others, how we can turn those challenges into transformative opportunities, and how we can develop agile and effective organisations.
• Mindfulness for Social Change: Harnessing the power of attention and awareness.
• Creative Tools for Social Change: Cross/multi-disciplinary approaches, applying creative tools to community empowerment, campaign development, and direct action.
showcasing best practice
To keep our finger on the pulse, we regularly invite practitioners and collectives doing exceptional work in the field of social change education and training. This means we can showcase and share best practice, enhance our own learning, and cross-pollinate approaches. We work with a wide network of colleagues and advisors to survey international initiatives. And we are always keen to connect with practitioners and organisations who share our passion.
fostering innovation and communities of inquiry
Things change. Embracing impermanence and finding the creative potential within it is a key to our effectiveness. Following a hunch, taking risks, bringing diverse people and influences together, are things we do well. In this way successful new trainings and programmes have been born. We are committed to fostering innovation and bringing practitioners together in new synergies. We host exploratory conversations and skill sharing, nurture new perspectives and methodologies, and keep our own approach fresh with curiosity. This takes the form of a series of communities of inquiry, seminars and learning labs. In addition to these, each summer we host the autonomously directed Eroles Project, where emergent and radically participatory processes refresh our spirit of innovative inquiry.
Innovative trainings and inquiries we are developing and supporting currently include:
• Resourcing Resilience: Skills for Trauma Intervention
• Holistic Security Training
• Thinking Diversity Radically: A Community of Deep Inquiry
• Ecology of Social Movements: Agency, Theory, and Strategy
responsive design
We partner with organisations and groups to help them identify training needs, and then we design and develop training programmes to meet those needs. These bespoke trainings are co-created with the partner organisations so as to ensure relevance and effectiveness.
We look out for issues and concerns that cut across the European arena, and try to bring relevant constituencies, groups and individuals together so that experience and learning can be shared across organisations and movements. Identifying emerging and changing needs we design trainings that can help our movements stay healthy, dynamic, and relevant.
securing resources
Many groups and organisations find it difficult to generate resources to access training, to find space to reflect deeply on experience, to incorporate learning into their practice, or to create more strategic capacity. So we help secure funding to support groups and organisations to access these things. In this way we enable them to build capacity in the ways they identify as important to realising their aims. These bespoke training programmes and organisational processes can range from one off course provision to multi-year strategies. Get in touch if you would like us to help your organisation or group access capacity building trainings.