Strategic Leadership

Meet the Team

Program description

With Nontokozo,

& An

It aims to address the challenges involved in bringing together the best aspects of leadership with the best aspects of more horizontal ways of organising, including a critique of both. The practices of leaderfulness draw on renewed and expanded notions of leadership, such as the idea of “group-centred leadership” articulated by Ella Baker, who was critical of a leadership style which tends to centralise power, decision making and responsibility for meaningful action in a single leader. She claimed that “Strong people don’t need [a] strong leader”.

Leaderfulness goes beyond leadership as merely the quality of individuals, to engender a culture of leaderfulness in which power is distributed appropriately and all members of an organisation or network are supported to grow into leaderfulness. In addition to supporting the acquisition of leadership qualities by individuals, a leaderful culture requires structures and systems that enable the distribution of power and influence – and nurture leaderfulness in us all. These structures and systems are rooted in the values of solidarity or what the systems scientist Donella Meadows calls ‘going for the good of the whole’

The aims of the training are:

• To support the building of collective power, agency, and leaderfulness in social movements, organisations and groups – working to achieve structural transformation to challenge ecological and socio-political injustice.

• To understand and be able to apply the key principles of Leaderful Organising.

• To create a space for collective reflection, analysis, and learning from participants’ experiences of social movement work across Europe.

More concretely, in this training we will explore ideas, develop skills and learn practices essential to Leaderful Organising related to:

• Effective distribution of power and ability to work well with dynamics of privilege and inclusion

• Methods that encourage participation and mutual empowerment

• Forms of decision making that align with objectives and core values

• The nurturing of group members’ capacity to offer diverse leadership contributions

• Effective communication, including dialogue and empathic listening

• Strategic development, including visioning and planning

• Ongoing learning and reflection, providing responses and adaptive capabilities

• Methods that ensure resilience and the sustainability of individuals and organisations

• Systems to support effective coordination and collaboration.

We will create a space for learning that is shaped through collective reflection, analysis, and sharing of participants’ experiences from movements across Europe. The learning will include exploring practices for self-awareness in our own use of power, holding and distributing power, holding and sharing responsibilities, and other transformative leadership qualities. We will aim to create a temporary community where our efforts to embody the values and principles of leaderfulness create a space for lived transformative learning.

Who is it aimed at?

Anyone involved in socially engaged action on environmental, political and social justice issues. We embrace a broad definition of activism, including: Resistance – action preventing further damage to ecosystems and social justice; Renewal – action focused on developing and creating alternatives for healthier societies and communities; and Building Resilience – action supporting increased resilience in communities to weather the uncertain times ahead.

The main spoken language on the course will be English.

If you need alternative transfer options or support, please reply to write to info @ resilientuprising.org

Go to the people, learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have – Lao Tzu

This training will share a framework for Leaderful Organising. It includes practices and understanding that can help organisations and groups to distribute power and leadership effectively. It offers an approach that addresses two related issues: the problems of leadership, that can lead to entrenched power interests, poor accountability, disempowerment, and traditional hierarchical structures, and; the problems of leaderlessness, where social movements and organisations, rejecting leadership adopt ‘horizontal’ structures in ways that can lack direction, continuity, and coherence.

Jeroen

Residential Retreat & post-retreat 6 weeks

Why attend?

The local, national and global economic and political elites are killing us.

• Our grassroots organisations needs a really healthy and collaborative leadership culture.

• We need to be able to create distributed ownership of a DNA of a healthy and courageous culture across our organisations.

• We need to have shared methodologies across projects in a global community, so we can easily learn and support each other.

Our most precious resource is the people who show up as volonteers, as the people we are engaging in conversations, and the staff of our organisations. The bread and butter activity is meetings, informal conversations on the phone, online, meetings etc. Our attentivness, care and courage in these conversations is the lifeblood of what we are creating.

We look forward to go into deep learning, build community and establish relationship with the mentors with Integration Station.

We live in a time when the brokenness of our world is undeniable

Climate collapse, rising authoritarianism, deep inequality, and the erosion of collective hope.

Since the fall of alternatives to extractive capitalism, many have turned inward, isolated in silos and stripped of faith in a shared future.

The thread of resistance and collective courage has never been lost.

Across history, mentors and movements have shown us another path: Civil resistance, solidarity, and the discovery of strength in community.

There is a tradition and we are gathering the teachers to deliver the key learning.

There's Hope...