Build Teams that Drive Campaigns – Community Organising Foundations

Without a strong leadership team, campaigns often fall at the first hurdle. We can’t build power alone – it depends on teams sharing responsibility, developing each other’s leadership and holding each other accountable. A good team keeps a campaign focused, moving in the right direction, and resilient to challenges.

This training explores why leadership teams are so important in organising and what makes them effective. Through interactive exercises and frameworks, you’ll work through the essentials: crafting a clear purpose statement, agreeing norms for decision making and accountability, and creating roles that distribute leadership – all with collective care at the centre. You’ll leave with practical tools to build or strengthen your own leadership team.

Outcomes:

• Understand the importance of teams and how you make them effective.
• Practise building a team.
• Reflect on how you can apply your learning to your organising. 

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 Lew Ai Le 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.

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. As Community Organiser at Act Build Change, 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.

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.