Introduction to Transformative Community Organising

This training introduces you to transformative community organising – an approach that combines the strategic power-building of community organising with the sustaining practice of collective care.

Through interactive exercises and tools, you’ll work through the essentials: understanding what organisers actually do, what power means, and different ways to build teams and movements. You’ll then explore why collective care matters for sustaining your work over the long term, and guiding principles for centring human experience and putting care into practice.

Outcomes:

• Understand what transformative community organising is.
• Explore fundamental concepts of community organising and collective care. 
• Reflect on how you can apply these principles to your own work.

This training is for both new and experienced organisers who want to understand what transformative community organising is. We recommend all members start here before moving on to our foundations series.

Meet the facilitators

Emma Batrick is passionate about social mobility, social justice and the drivers of poverty and deprivation - to the point of obsession with housing and class issues. Emma brings over ten years of community organising experience, having campaigned on housing, community assets, local democracy and policy issues. She has also worked with groups to create communication tools to empower others to help themselves to prevent crisis, while working within Trussell's Organising and Local Mobilisation programme. Emma also has twenty years of youth work experience, and currently leads a club for young carers. Combining her interests in social justice, writing and music, Emma is author of When Sam Tried to Close the Foodbank, has contributed to working class poetry anthology Inheritance with Late Britain Press, and has written for The Pavement Magazine, GigWise and Superjam.

Kate McIntosh has organised people who are sharply affected by injustice to act together, exercise power and win change. She has trained hundreds of campaigners and equipped people to lead in their communities to secure rent cuts, pay rises, and policy change. Before Act Build Change, Kate was a community organiser based at a food bank where she organised people on very low incomes to win service charge cuts and build support for social security reform. She has roots organising in students’ unions, ACORN, and grassroots neighbourhood campaigns on issues ranging from disability rights in higher education to dangerous tower block cladding.

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.