Catching up on Movement Building

We haven’t let social/physical distancing stop us from delivering our movement building trainings and events which aim to bring people together for sharing and building skills and knowledge to increase our collective impact and power in creating change.

Mobilise.Resist.Transform course, now in its third year, included sessions on intersectionality, extractivism and climate finance, communications, solidarity and moving forward. It was a pleasure to explore these issues with this year’s enthusiastic group of 25 people - we can’t wait to see what they do next.

For our final session in the System Change for a Just Transition seminar series we teamed up with the Galway Feminist Collective to present a webinar called ‘Women Resisting Climate Change in the Global South’.

For this webinar we were joined by Lólita Chávez, leader of the Council of K’iche’ Peoples in Defense of Life, Mother Nature, Earth and Territory (CPK) and member of the TZ'KAT Network of Ancestral Healers of Community Feminism, an indigenous led organisation that supports women activists and human rights defenders involved in community struggles, as well as Zeinab Ghadhamfar, the environmental legal officer for the Save Lamu community organisation in Kenya, part of the network African Women Unite Against Destructive Extractivism (WOMIN). You can watch this webinar here at this link.

These events have given us the opportunity to foster connections with groups in Ireland and beyond, including the aforementioned as well as Talamh Beo, Seed Savers, Foodture, Financial Justice Ireland, Save our Sperrins, Ecoleaks (Argentina), The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Trócaire and the Latin America Solidarity Centre.

Other sessions recently carried out in the series included, The Future of Food, Resisting Mining & Extractive Projects, Energy Democracy and ‘Is It all about the money?’. You can watch all of sessions which were hosted as webinars here at this link.

Our Facilitators and Trainers network, has also moved online to help cultivate activists with skills in facilitation, and now bringing those skills to online forums - something of high demand right now.
We are honoured to be able to support so many people build confidence in presenting workshops and gain skills for empowering and engaging people in environmantal issues and campaigning. We have lots of people from across the country on board, delivering participatory workshops to activist groups and their own communities too. If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, you can find out more and sign up here.

Last month we hosted ‘Training on Social Movement Ecologies’ online with the Ayni Institute for 100 activists across Ireland. The Ayni Institute is a US based organisation founded by Carlos Saavedra, a community organiser with the DREAM movement in the US, and Paul Engler, author of ‘This is an Uprising’. Both work closely with Momentum US and the Sunrise Movement among others.

The training explored ideas of strategic capacity (how to do the right thing at the right time), different theories of change, working together despite differing opinions, tackling racism within our movements and more. It catalysed many conversations, particularly around the need for communication among the various strands of the environmental movement.We are very grateful to Carlos and Rodrigo, who both delivered the training, for their time - particularly as it was in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US .

If this sounds like something you’d like to learn about, check out this Youtube playlist detailing the content of the Ayni webinars, ‘Movement Ecology In Times Of Crisis’ here.