Practise Care to Navigate Tension - Community Organising Foundations

Organising is emotionally demanding work. When teams face conflict, stress, or difficult decisions, collective care becomes essential – not as a luxury, but as the foundation that keeps movements alive and healthy.

This training explores what collective care means in organising and why it matters for building strong, resilient teams. You'll learn to recognise when your team is under strain and understand unhelpful patterns that emerge under stress. Through case studies and practical exercises, you'll explore tools for decision-making, accountability, boundaries, and rest to support your team when tensions arise.

You'll leave with practical approaches to strengthen collective care and sustain your organising over the long term.

Outcomes:

• Understand collective care in organising and how to spot when your team is under strain.
• Practise applying tools and strategies to strengthen collective care.
• Reflect on how you can apply these principles to your own work.

This training is part of our foundations series, designed for both new and experienced organisers who are ready to develop practical organising skills. We recommend taking the introduction training first to understand the core concepts of transformative community organising.

Meet the facilitators

Ariel Whitson has over a decade of experience as a community organiser focused on social justice issues, primarily with environmental and land justice. Before joining Act Build Change, she was the Senior Director of Community Organising and Education at TreePeople, a leading Los Angeles-based NGO, where she led a team of 40 organisers and educators supporting communities impacted by climate change and environmental injustice. Prior to TreePeople, she ran major advocacy campaigns at Ten Strands, securing significant legislative and funding victories for climate literacy. Ariel is passionate about healing the violent separation of land and people through organising.

Kennedy Walker is a trainer, coach and facilitator. They’ve helped individuals, groups and organisations move through conflict, build power, cultivate knowledge and strengthen skills for over ten years. They’ve trained with the Gestalt Centre in London, Navigate, Action Learning Associates and more in counselling skills, trauma informed facilitation, coaching, and mediation. They've co-founded organisations such as Kinfolk Network in 2017 and others that aim to strengthen collective care, learning and power. Kennedy holds a master's degree in Human Rights, Culture and Social Justice and is currently a trainee counsellor.

Cost

• Free for Full Members (those with a paid membership) using the discount code below.
• £15 for everyone else.

If you would like to become a Full Member (and get access to lots of other great events, trainings and more), visit our membership page to get started.

Access

This event will be held online using Zoom. The link will be shared with registered attendees before the start of the event.

To avoid difficulties accessing the workshop, please ensure that you register for the event with the same email address that you intend to use on Zoom.

Please get in touch if there is anything we can do to support your participation in this session. This includes, but is not limited to, language, comfort, and access (physical, emotional, technological) needs.