Grassroots initiatives are a vital force for social change, contributing to the development of a more just and peaceful world. These initiatives must be empowered, skilled, and resilient to fulfill this potential. This workshop series is designed to elevate the capabilities of people with significant responsibility within their initiatives, enabling groups to achieve more sustainable and impactful outcomes.
Just the Facts
- 5 online workshops on essential skills around leadership in grassroots contexts
- Tuesdays, 18:00-20:30, starting July 1st, ending on July 29th
- For people who take a lot of responsibility within their initiatives
- A mix of training, reflection and peer-support
- A small group of max. 20 peers, curated via application process.
- Apply by June 27th to join all 5 sessions.
Topics:
- Session 1: Leadership – you can’t share what you don’t claim – July 1st, 18:00 CET
- Session 2: Structure & Rhythm – essential principles for working together with less effort – July 8th, 18:00 CET
- Session 3: Empowering Others – Creating a developmental context – July 15th, 18:00 CET
- Session 4: Addressing Disagreement and Establishing a Feedback Culture – July 22nd, 18:00 CET
- Session 5: Strategizing – plotting a clear path to enable effective collective action – July 29th, 18:00 CET
Click here to jump to the application
Why this program?
As active people in different kinds of leadership roles we’ve encountered many of them ourselves over the years. We know how isolating, pressuring and overwhelming it can be to feel responsible for the success of an initiative. After talking to many activists, changemakers and socially engaged people over many years, we started to see patterns in the challenges that come with taking responsibility. And we’ve learned some ways of moving through this discomfort with greater ease. This workshop series is the result of our accumulated experience, learning from our own teachers and mentors and a dozen conversations we had with leaders of Polish and Austrian grassroots initiatives.
Grassroots activism and leadership…
… that’s a paradox right? Not the way we see it. When we say “leadership” we mean the process of taking responsibility for enabling others to achieve common goals in the face of uncertainty. This definition is from Marshall Ganz’ Community Organizing Framework. It allows for many different people exercising leadership in many different ways. And it’s useful to be able to talk about leadership in ways that allow us to better understand what people need to thrive in self-organized, purpose driven, bottom up social change initiatives.
Who is it for?
This program is designed for people who take on significant responsibility for the success of their initiatives. It might be a good fit if you can identify with one or more of the following challenges:
- You often experience pressure stemming from the many areas of your initiatives work that call your attention.
- People look to you for orientation when things get difficult and sometimes it feels overwhelming.
- Sometimes you feel alone with recognizing the opportunities and risks that your initiative faces and calling them to the collective attention.
- You see it as part of your responsibility to pass on your experience, but don’t always know how, so you end up doing things yourself which sometimes exceeds your capacity.
- With your team it’s not easy to find time for reflection, expressing emotions, addressing tensions, or taking important decisions together
- People in your initiative are super passionate about the cause, but to you it seems like your lacking a clear common direction
- You wonder how to reduce hierarchies and include more people, but they keep happening.
- Disagreement often gets swept under the rug or addressed in ways that lead to more tension.
Click here to jump to the registration
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What you’ll get
Each session will consist of input, reflection on your own situation and practicing with the tools and principles presented by the trainers. This part of the workshop will take between 1.5 and 2 hrs. It will be followed by a peer support session, where you get to help each other move through the acute leadership challenges you are experiencing in your day to day engagement. We recommend you to attend the whole series, as this way you will be able to form connections with other attendees and have a more profound learning experience.
Sessions
Session 1: Leadership – you can’t share what you don’t claim.
Session 2: Structure & Rhythm – essential principles for working together with less effort
Session 3: Empowering Others – Creating a developmental context
Session 4: Addressing Disagreement and Establishing a Feedback Culture
Session 5: Strategizing – plotting a clear path to enable effective collective action
Click here to jump to the application
About our Facilitators
Jan Horzela is a community organizer with many years of experience in facilitating group processes. In the years 2007-2015 he worked as an educator in Warsaw in a socio-therapeutic youth center for young people at risk of social exclusion. Since 2016, he has focused on creating spaces for social activation and supporting social movements through various projects using art, pedagogy and other approaches. To combine his knowledge in facilitation and political education, he co-founded the Civil Action Network. Over the years he’s found that challenges in groups often arise around questions of power and leadership. That’s why Jan is excited to share his experience in the frame of Integralead Essentials.
Jonas Gröner a professionally trained and certified leadership coach, community-builder, and facilitator strongly committed to the regenerative paradigm. He’s been working in self-organized contexts from permaculture farms to start-ups, co-ops, and non-profits for the past 10 years and is passionate about supporting people with a vision for a world that works for all life, to find ways of putting that vision into action by cultivating resilient relationships, networks and communities. He sees that the world around us is becoming increasingly uncertain and that great leaders are those who can help others to act in the face of that uncertainty. That’s why he cares about supporting more people to develop these capacities.
