A few weeks ago I spent a weekend with Labour Behind the Label a Bristol based co-operative who campaign to support garment workers. They focus on efforts worldwide to improve working conditions and campaign on a range of issues, from getting compensation for the survivors of the Rana Plaza disaster to fighting for a living […]
The folk over at German based trainingskollektiv have written a detailed reflection on the week-long ‘Facilitating Change’ event which took place earlier this year. They’ve called it Mainstreams, privileges and exclusion in radical groups and just translated it into English. It’s worth a read and you don’t need to have been there to find some value […]
I recently found myself facilitating a two day meeting for a large campaigning organisation where the group were discussing strategies for a potential new campaign. Most of the participants were in the room, but three joined us by video from two different locations. I was a little apprehensive about this as I have never facilitated […]
I-statements. To quote Wikipedia: “I-messages are often used with the intent to be assertive without putting the listener on the defensive. They are also used to take ownership for one’s feelings rather than implying that they are caused by another person. An example of this would be to say: “I really am getting backed up […]
Sustaining Resistance, Empowering Renewal 26 April – 4 May 2014 This training offers personal and collective tools to make our activism more effective by supporting us to: – stay in activist work for the ‘long haul’ by avoiding burn out through creating personal and group sustainability and adding continuity to our movement building, – ensure […]
Over at Organizing Change, Drew Serres is writing about the problems of consensus and how to fix them. It’s good stuff and I’d urge you to read it and join the conversation. He shares some of the problems of contemporary consensus and offers five thoughts on dealing with those problems. Critiques of contemporary consensus are […]
The curse of the consultant is to be forever moving on, often never hearing the results of his or her work. So it was a great pleasure to hear from a couple of people who had been involved in something I helped with in 2010, all the more so as they were so appreciative: I […]
In Rhizome we have recently been sharing with each other the work we have done and how we felt about it. Common to us all of course is working with, facilitating, training, supporting groups of people. Some groups have many tensions unexpressed within them , power struggles, individuals feeling excluded or disregarded, mistrust, misunderstood or […]
Matthew and I have been doing some work with a food coop; helping voluntary team leaders review and add to their conflict management tools. We’ll shortly be running our third workshop. Here’s what we work with people on – Aims To develop the understanding and application of appropriate states of mind (consensual, non-judgemental, solution focussed) […]
