by Jana Ahlers
Train to be. To be trained. Pick your side. This piece covers the history and strategic direction of European Alternative’s work in the training field. It engages with you as a curious learner and provides insights on why training is resurfacing as a strategic priority across European civil society, as well as reveal some of European Alternatives` training visions for the years to come.
When was the last time you attended a training? When was the last time you learned something new? Not simply driven by intellectual stimuli but rather a particular skill or type of behaviour that you acquired.
Training – “the action of teaching a person or animal a particular skill or type of behaviour.” Are you thinking about a dog’s playground? How exciting that by including the reference to an animal being trained in Oxford’s definition, we immediately comprehend the necessary connection between mind and body. Training, commonly understood and demoted to something practical or technical suddenly resurfaces as the intellectual and embodied art of mastery of a particular skill or behaviour. Precious.
Syndicat Summit Bremen © Theater Bremen
The beginnings
At European Alternatives training and capacity building goes back to the beginnings of the organisation. Weather as part of the early campaigns, such as the Roma Rights are Human Rights Campaign in 2009, during the Transeuropa Caravans ahead of the 2014 European Parliamentary election or in preparation of the Transnational Dialogues, training is a backbone and connecter across the work-streams of the organisation. In 2013 you could have attended a workshop called Facilitating Consensus and Overcoming Barriers in Horizontal Groups at Transeuropa Festival in London. In 2019 taken part in a course on “Countering Hate Speech” or in in 2023 you might sat in a workshop called Pour Des Alternatives Solidaires Décoloniales, Féministes et Écologiques in Bobigny or discussed and practised how to Ecologise Demands at the Workplace at the Syndicat Summit in Bremen.
European Alternatives does not halt at sparking a thought, inviting a provocation or hosting an encounter, it is committed to training for change on the ground. EA organises its work by five streams (imagine, learn, assemble, act and train) to achieve the strategic objectives of the organisation. The train stream imagines, conceptualizes, delivers, experiments and evaluates the methodologies, pedagogies and curricula and seeks to live up to the principle that education and training are at the core of transformative action and social change.
“Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy” (Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here, 1967).
The training necessary
European Alternatives need not only to be imagined but also demanded and enacted. In the Train stream, we build and train for the attitudes, skills and behaviour required to do so. We know Europe has the resources to reinvent itself; so we get down to it. What skills or behaviours does Europe need? What skills and behaviours do you want to acquire?
At this specific moment in time, more and more organisations are inquiring about training. Irrespective of the content of the request, why is that? In an era of multi crisis’, people are longing for agency, longing for avenues to pull them out of disillusion, stagnation and the assessment that, what we have done so far, clearly has not worked. Training comes in as an infrastructure that lasts, an investment of energy that will succeed even if it is in the marginal transformation of a single mind. Training is a vehicle of trust and collective agency, a reminder of the power that we have that no-one can take from us. Strategically many organisations have realised that neither big numbers, nor influential individuals are the sole key for change but returned to the basics of base building and community based organizing as a tactic that paired with other approaches promises a greater return. Every approach requires education. Education for the many. So in our attempt to support organisations to organise to win to step closer to the desired outcomes of the future we all want, we stumble upon craving for training on a variety of topics including:
- Imagination: How can we ourselves become better at imagining that another world is possible and more importantly, how do we train others to multiply imaginative processes to eventually suggest and implement them.
- Advocacy: How can we be more eloquent, true to ourselves, smart and effective at bringing forward our demands to decision makers.
- Holistic Security: How can we protect our people and communities from growing repression and prefigure ways in which security is not confining but allowing us freedom of mind.
- Working with the Body: How can we include mind and body in what we do to ensure that the outcomes of our learning processes last and attract different people in different ways.
- Strategy: How do we do what we do more effectively or how do we need to re-work our Theories of Change, Tools and Tactics in this changing environment.
- And the list goes on.
Our inspirations
At European Alternatives we listen to our participants, members, networks and partners and work closely with them to design and deliver the most suitable approaches to training possible. In our work we are inspired by educators, pedagogues, thinkers, researchers and organizers with historical significance, as well as those working on the ground, carrying the wisdom of their communities. We are inspired by Paulo Freire’s Popular Education and work closely with pedagogy developed in a Community Organizing context, by Critical Pedagogy, Radical Adult Education, Transformative Learning Theory as well as approaches from experimental, experience based and adventure based education. There is a lot to say about some of these approaches to learning and education but we will leave that for another time and end a quote which illustrates our work:
The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean they can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves. (Myles Horton, 1905-1990. We make the road by walking: conversations on education and social change, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990)
From approaches to praxis, how does training actually work in practice? We have a variety of formats through which we train at EA. Training ranges from Basic Training to Advanced Group Specific Training to Train the Trainer Formats. These include accompaniment processes, long-term fellowship and residencies, as well as mentorship formats and residential training. Here is a basic overview over the scope and reach of some of the training this year and in the next section we give two showcase examples of successful training programmes of 2025.
A pinch of nostalgia – two highlights if Training at EA this year
Collective Care Online Series How can we center care as a force for political action?
If you wonder how we can attend to our personal and collective needs while still remaining active and politically engaged, you can re-watch our Collective Ca re Online Series, starring incredible practitioners, thinkers and organizers. Sujin Noël, coach and consultant, explains how emotions propel our political claims and how our politics shape the way we appraise our emotions as well as how we can nourish the transformative potential of political emotions on the ground. Hala Alyan, clinical psychologist, professor and writer, guides us how to look after our needs and boundaries because if we aren’t looking after ourselves, we cannot hold space for others. She grounds self-care in collective political struggle movement organizing, moving away from its individualist and consumerist representation. Professor emerita Joan C. Tronto and professor Deva Woodley in their session Sustaining Societies of Care re-recenter care as the essential relational practice that sustains the world. They explore the importance of embracing an ethics of care that does not only touch on the breadth and materiality of care, but also on the ways by which care opens up perspectives to challenge current dominant systems of interlocked injustices; to learn from the past and to envision the future. In the final session, organizer and facilitator Adilka Pimentel explores concrete examples of practices of collective care in movement contexts, centering the interconnectedness in our struggles for social justice. She dives into approaches of harm and safety and manifests care as a form of praxis that centers practices and values at the heart of our struggles.
Migrant and BIPoC Organizing Train the Trainer Series How can we organize to win?
If you are a facilitator, mediator, trainer, community leader, caregivers or someone involved in holding space, we would have loved to have you at our recent Migrant and BIPoC Organizing Train the Trainer Series. As the world grows darker, we believe it is time to invest in carrying our knowledge of social change into and across social movements and communities. We ran the series not only to build capacity but also to deepen alliances and strengthen networks across Europe and beyond. If you had to pick a few, which parts of our modular series would you have attended: Somatics and Body Work, Community, Organizing, Repression and Holistic Security, Narrative & Messaging, Resilience & Transformative Conflict, Grief, Disability Justice and Power and Rank Dynamics. The Train the Trainer approach gives participants insights into relational, process and methodological details of a training and supports them to bring the learning back into their communities. Over 150 signed up for the series. We are likely to run a second edition in 2025, will you be in?
We make the road by walking – Outlook for 2025
Looking towards the year to come, we will respond to the demand for training across civil society and implement training programming to strengthen facilitation skills as part of community based and transnational assemblies, sharpen advocacy skills for migrant advocates across Europe, upskill communities on organizing capabilities and offered content tailored training to partners across our networks. Vision wise, think: deepening transversal and translocal solidarities, agile and long-term strategy, dealing with multi-crisis anxiety, responding to political disillusion and the shift to the right, conflict mediation and strategies to build resilient more campaigns and and improve inner group dynamics. We will offer mentoring for groups and strategy accompaniment, provide the infrastructure for encounter and peer-to-peer learning and deliver on-the-spot training that caters to the groups and needs present. We will enhance our trainers network and are excited to share a more detailed training programme that will be published in early 2025.
As we make the road by walking, we are excited to draw stronger ties between European Alternative’s streams and ensure that learning and education are interwoven across the activities of the organisation. Until then, we hope you train to be or uncover the possibilities to be trained.
“This discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection” ((Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury Press, 1970)