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 April 1st, ending on April 29th
- For people who take a lot of responsibility within their initiatives
- A mix of training, reflection and peer-support
Topics:
- 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
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.
Für wen ist es geeignet?
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.
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.
Many of us had bad experiences and all of us heard stories of harmful and abusive ways of practicing leadership. of domination based hierarchies that we want to leave behind. For many it’s a loaded topic, it can evoke discomfort or even fear. Striving to work in a non-hierarchical way seems appealing, but comes with its own challenges. Someone always takes on more responsibility, has more experience or overview, or is left alone with doing the crucial work. It seems like it’s impossible to get rid of hierarchies. But not addressing power dynamics connected to different approaches to leadership amplifies their detrimental effects.
In this workshop you will:
- Identify which skills you want to focus on developing in this moment
- Reflect on your own experience with leadership.
- Share experiences and observations with others.
- Learn about the helpful approaches to leadership that enable you to take responsibility for enabling your group to take purposeful action.
Session 2: Structure & Rhythm – essential principles for working together with less effort
In civic spaces ressources are often scarce. This is not only true for money, but mainly also peoples time. Finding time for reflecting on past actions, taking care of emotions that come up in relation to the work, addressing tensions in the team, planning and prioritizing work for the closest future, learning and passing on skills and taking important decisions can often be difficult. This can lead to frustration, chaos, escalating conflict, people withdrawing or dropping out and at worst an initiative in paralysis.
In this workshop you will:
- Learn about 5 essential modes of spending time for a well working, collaboratively led team
- Reflect on where your initiative is in relation to this and what needs to happen next, to implement some of the learnings from this workshop.
- Learn how to create reliable structure and rhythm that makes collaboration flow with less effort
Session 3: Empowering Others – Creating a developmental context
People who take responsibility for their initiatives often end up getting stuck with more work that they can sustainably do. At the same time, while caring a lot about empowering others, it can be challenging to find time for onboarding and mentoring when work is urgent. This can lead to feeling pressured, left alone and overwhelmed and overstepping one’s own boundaries.
In this workshop you will:
- Reflect on where you can practice the skill of mentorship
- Learn about essential principles for creating an empowering environment
- Learn from each other by hearing the challenges and learnings of others
- Learn tools for holding someone learning process
Session 4: Addressing Disagreement and Establishing a Feedback Culture
Civic initiatives are for the most part fueled by the personal motivation and passion of their members. When everyone is deeply invested in the cause and their actions, encountering disagreement or receiving challenging feedback can often feel quite severe. Often this leads to a culture of not addressing disagreement at all, where it’s extremely difficult to transform tensions and learn from conflicts. In a different scenario disagreement gets addressed in ways that put further emotional charge into the space and make working together challenging.
In this workshop you will:
- Reflect on where you currently stand on the road to having a lively culture of disagreeing and giving each other feedback
- Learn about and practice a simple pattern for giving and receiving feedback from a position of leadership
- Learn some principles for how to help your initiative to develop its own feedback culture
Session 5: Strategizing – plotting a clear path to enable effective collective action
Many of us are engaged in civic initiatives out of a host of different motivations: responding to urgent need, contributing to social change, being connected with like minded people, learning new skills,. With this mix of motivations it can often be difficult to be clear about the goals we pursue and the pathways for reaching them. Unclear narratives about “what we are about” make enrollment of new members difficult, and taking decisions about what needs to be done next, near impossible.
In this workshop you will:
- Reflect on where you can create opportunities for your team to practice strategizing next
- Learn the basic ingredients for an effective strategy
- Reflect on why setting goals matters.
- Try on the lens of “strategizing as a skill to practice”
Pricing
We recognize that resources are often scarce in passion driven social change projects. That’s why we want to keep this program as financially accessible as possible and are offering it on a “pay what you can” basis. Please choose a level of financial contribution that is a bit of a stretch (so you know you are committed to showing up fully to the workshops) but does not create financial hardship.
Please register using the form below by choosing the ticket that is accessible to you for each session you would like to attend.
The project “Integral Leadership Skills for Civil Society”, is co-funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ Programme as a Small Scale Partnership (Project Number: Project Number 2024-1-AT01-KA210-ADU-1450D872). However, the views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the OeAD-GmbH can be held responsible.
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