Context is everything. While the following description gives a general overview of the content of this workshop, I believe that truly meaningful training is adapted to your local culture and situation. In addition, I am fully committed to using my training opportunities to build facilitation capacity in local communities, and therefore prefer to co-facilitate with local experts – particularly people of color and women. Have an idea about how you’d like me to adapt this training to your community? Let me know!

To live in society is to navigate a jungle of social systems of all shapes and sizes: corporations, sports leagues, internet forums, government programs, and countless others. Unfortunately, very few of these social systems are designed with thoughtfulness or love. In a era when so many of our vital life choices have been delegated to technocrats, corporate execs, and elected officials, it’s time to create the conditions for local, participatory, and democratic institutions to thrive.

In this workshop, we’ll discover how to do just. Through applying permaculture thinking to institutions, movements and communities, we’ll discover fundamental organizing principles used by cultures and ecosystems around the globe. We’ll face the crippling legacy of colonialism head-on, and share strategies for decolonizing our institutions, hearts and minds. We’ll examine the life cycle of social movements, and the various strategies and tactics that propel them to success. We’ll learn the six behaviors that bind communities together and come up with ways to incorporate them into our own work. And we’ll apply design thinking of all of the above, creating concrete action plans to help our movements thrive.

Workshop topics may include:

• Decolonizing permaculture
• The lifecycle of social movements
• Power analysis
• Identity and intersectionality
• Theater of the oppressed
• Identity Caucuses