Training

Who’s offering training in nonviolent direct action right now?

Burnout is a topic that is close to my heart. Having experienced a couple of intense periods of burnout and having recently realised that I continue to hold chronic low-level stress, tiredness and anxiety in my body, the question ‘How can we do sustainable activism?’ is one that I am constantly seeking answers to.

Doing activism…

Do you want to strengthen your workshop facilitation skills? Do you want to help social change groups and mission-driven NGOs deal more skilfully with social class and classism in their own organisations, in their members’ lives and in the wider society?

If so, Exploring Class may be for you.

In April, two dozen activists, facilitators and trainers from around the UK took part in two advanced workshops led by Erika Thorne and Nico Amador from the US group, Training for Change (TfC).

TfC’s ‘Training for Social Action Trainers’ and ‘Advanced Training of Trainers’ workshops finally took place in London after two years of hard work by Peace News, Turning the Tide and Campaign Bootcamp.

A comment…

Let’s put two things next to each other. On the one hand, Peace News is committed to nonviolent revolution, to the nonviolent transformation of society including the replacement of capitalism by participatory democracy in the workplace and the reorganisation of the…

While PN staff were in Paris for the climate protests, we were taught by Reclaim the Power how to make human blockades stronger. (The blockade was to protect the Red Lines action on D12.)


1. Everyone wears a backpack. TOP TIP: Reclaim the Power advised us to wear peaked caps so that we could duck our heads down to protect our eyes if the police walked along the line pepper-spraying our faces.

2. Everyone loosens their backpack straps.

3. The…

Turning the Tide supports people at the grassroots to work effectively for social change. The trainers deliver workshops and events and are supported by the community of trainers and Turning the Tide staff.

The opportunity is open to anyone sympathetic to Quakers with facilitation skills and experience of working at the grassroots for social change. If you are interested, or know someone who might be, please go to the…

There is a saying in the field of community development finance – providing credit to disadvantaged groups – that if you never have a bad loan (that isn’t re-paid), you aren’t doing it right. You ought to be going to the risky, hard-to-reach areas, where things don’t work out.

I think something like this happened to the Peace News Winter Gathering, which turned into the Peace News Spring Training, which has unfortunately been withdrawn by Seeds for Change, who were going to be…

I want to give a warning shot to anti-oppression trainers and activists. My bottom line is this: we need to stop applying theory onto people’s experiences, wielding it like a weapon to describe what we believe whether we actually see it in a room or not. It’s not smart organising, creates intense backlash, and shrinks – not grows – our movements.

An organiser recently shared with me an example of what I’m talking about.

He was working in a union that represents workers at a…

The workshop focussed on naming and exploring many of the dynamics that so often go unspoken and unprocessed in groups.

I was part of the mainstream of the group – I come from a grassroots ‘activist’ culture, I’ve been to university, I’m from the UK, I’m white. Being part of the group’s mainstream meant I was one of the people who had the power to make the subtle decision of what behaviours and attitudes were acceptable in the space; essentially, I helped define…

Consensus decision-making has been growing more widespread in a variety of movements, from environmental activists, to co-operatives, to the recent explosion of Occupy camps. Rebecca Smith of Seeds for Change told PN: ‘We have seen a change in meeting culture in Britain, towards a greater awareness of the value of participation and the methods that make it possible.’

“The first step is learning to be honest with yourself."

Seeds for Change, a training and support network, has…

Nonviolence training run by Turning the Tide Photo : Turning th e Tide

‘Our colonial masters were brutal in their governance. The independence leaders saw that as their role model, so they too used oppression and brutality to rule. It became generational. We have not been taught alternative ways of making our point.’ These are the words of Malesi Kinaro, executive director of Friends Peace and Community Development, a Kenyan Quaker organisation that in…

Back story

Laura Shipler Chico

When violence erupted after Kenya’s last elections in 2007, Kenyan Quakers were quick to respond – first with humanitarian aid, then listening to people’s stories. Eventually they began to help people process their trauma and knit their communities back together. However, they soon began to see that, in order to build a lasting peace, they needed to speak out…

Many of us have beliefs about ourselves that prevent us from doing what we want to do, or being who we want to be. Those beliefs can follow us around like a ghost for large chunks of our lives. At the beginning of the year, I participated in Training for Change’s epic seven-day training for trainers in Margate. I went there expecting to pick up some new exercises and learn the subtleties of group dynamics. What I hadn’t bargained for were some pretty eye-opening realisations about myself.…

In mid-January, Daniel Hunter and Erika Thorne of the US ‘direct education’ group Training for Change led a powerful 10-day ‘training for trainers’ in Margate for 16 social action trainers and facilitators, including PN staff.

The event was organised by Quaker group Turning the Tide.

We’ll be publishing more about this workshop in a future issue.