Introduction to Transformative Community Organising

This training introduces you to transformative community organising – an approach that combines the strategic power-building of community organising with the sustaining practice of collective care.

Through interactive exercises and tools, you'll work through the essentials: understanding what organisers actually do, what power means, and exploring different ways of building teams and movements. You'll then dive into why collective care matters for sustaining your work over the long term, examine why good intentions alone aren't enough, and discover how to set healthy boundaries.

Outcomes:

• Understand what transformative community organising is.
• Explore fundamental tools of community organising and collective care.
• Reflect on how you can apply these principles to your own work.

This training is for both new and experienced organisers who want to understand what transformative community organising is. We recommend all members start here before moving on to our foundations series.

Meet the facilitators

Ariel Whitson has over a decade of experience as a community organiser focused on social justice issues, primarily with environmental and land justice. Before joining Act Build Change, she was the Senior Director of Community Organising and Education at TreePeople, a leading Los Angeles-based NGO, where she led a team of 40 organisers and educators supporting communities impacted by climate change and environmental injustice. Prior to TreePeople, she ran major advocacy campaigns at Ten Strands, securing significant legislative and funding victories for climate literacy. Ariel is passionate about healing the violent separation of land and people through organising.

Stephanie Wong is a community organiser, facilitator and collective care practitioner. She has won with many others on issues from citizenship for young people, securing better wages for 1000s of staff and winning housing for those seeking asylum. She has trained hundreds of community leaders who have gone on to win local and national policy change and political elections. She has taught at Stanford, Harvard, UCL and LSE University. She built Act Build Change with her husband Ricky in 2018 in response to some of the inaccessible ways organising was taught in the UK. Together, they hoped to give a contribution to the field of organising that would allow more of us to get great organising training in accessible, dignified and transformative ways.

Cost

• Free for Full Members (those with a paid membership) using the discount code on our website event page.
• £15 for everyone else.

If you would like to become a Full Member (and get access to lots of other great events, trainings and more), visit our membership page to get started.

Access

This event will be held online using Zoom. The link will be shared with registered attendees before the start of the event.

To avoid difficulties accessing the workshop, please ensure that you register for the event with the same email address that you intend to use on Zoom.

Please get in touch if there is anything we can do to support your participation in this session. This includes, but is not limited to, language, comfort, and access (physical, emotional, technological) needs.