Movement Learning Catalyst: building a learning community across struggles and places. 

The Movement Learning Catalyst has great news for you. We are about to share a new Learner’s Guide and launch a new action-learning platform that aims to nurture the interconnected movements, realities and responsive strategies needed to challenge systems of oppression we face.

Today, we’re facing complex intersecting crises that call for social movements able to build power to achieve systemic change. We’ve known this for centuries but today it seems harder than ever to find ways of working together across differences. Recognising that fragmentation and polarisation are among the main challenges that social movements are facing right now, we ask:

How can we build the alliances and strategies we need to make a better world possible?

The Movement Learning Catalyst offers a guide to learning for systemic change. It aims to support experienced activists and organisers by strengthening their ability to collaborate, strategize and learn from each other’s struggles. It offers new ways of thinking, tools, and practices to enhance strategising and movement building.

THE LEARNER’S GUIDE

The learning guide has five parts:

• The first part, “Transversal Organizing and the Ecology of Social Movements”, offers insights about the internal complexity of our movements and the practice of building effective alliances. You’lll explore the politics of power and inequality within and between organizations, as well as the challenges of organizing across movements and diverse communities.
• The second part looks at Transnational and Translocal Organizing, how social movements have organised across and beyond borders and how important it is today to think about your struggles, tactics and alliances from a transnational perspective.
• The third part turns to Strategy and Movements and how to develop longer term and responsive strategies for social change in a world that is volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous – asking what can be learnt from living systems to help us strategize effectively.
• Part four, on Movement Learning and Popular Education, brings insights from research and literature on the practices of radical ‘popular’ education, to help us reflect on our experiences of learning as activists and organisers, and identify ways it can be sustained or enhanced. 
• And, finally, the resource includes an educator’s guide, focusing on how this material can be used and adapted to support strategic learning that we believe can help us to build the scale and power of movements so needed today.

THE ACTION-LEARNING PLATFORM

Our action-learning platform includes all of these elements, in addition to high quality training resources, research and additional materials. We would like this space to provide structured action-reflection learning within movement building practices, by providing a well-crafted framework for ongoing action learning, mentorship, and peer-to- peer inquiry. 

Soon you will be able to find us here www.movementlearning.org, where you can also download the learning guide!

WHO IS BEHIND THIS

We have come together to work over the course of three years. Behind the project is a an international collaboration across pan-European activist training and popular education networks including Ulex Project, European Community Organising Network (ECON), activist researchers at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and us from European Alternatives. Each of the partners draws on a history of bringing movements together to learn from each other’s struggle and to organize across social movements, geographies and social realities.

We are more than excited to very soon share the Learning guide and the action-learning platform with you!