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

Stephanie Wong is a community organiser, facilitator and collective care practitioner. She has won with many others on issues from citizenship for young people, securing better wages for 1000s of staff and winning housing for those seeking asylum. She has trained hundreds of community leaders who have gone on to win local and national policy change and political elections. She has taught at Stanford, Harvard, UCL and LSE University. She built Act Build Change with her husband Ricky in 2018 in response to some of the inaccessible ways organising was taught in the UK. Together, they hoped to give a contribution to the field of organising that would allow more of us to get great organising training in accessible, dignified and transformative ways.

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.