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„I can’t liberate anybody, everybody has to liberate themselves.“

Building people’s power!

Every person has power. But only if you know about your own strength and skills, you can use them and work effectively for social change. The aim is not to get power over other people, but to develop your own power to act.

This approach, to become aware of your own strength, is called „Social Empowerment“. The aim is to empower people to become active for their own interests. It does not matter whether this is done in your personal life or through political activity within society. What is important is to recognise ways to act, alone or within a group, and to start to act, instead of giving away the responsibility for changing a situation to others.

People’s Power for social change develops when many people organise themselves in groups, and all together build a social movement.

Many groups which are working in social movements are familiar with the problem of being overwhelmed by political events and therefore only reacting to them. This way of working very often means only stuffing holes where injustice, destruction and unreasonable conditions are most obvious. For your work and engagement not only to be more than a botched-up job on society, it is necessary to search for the reasons and roots of the problems and to develop your own strategies for action.

I therefore think it is very important to develop and to share techniques and methods, which enable people to analyse links between and causes of society’s problems.

Trainings

I am available for a range of trainings, building on my training experience with War Resisters' International and other organisations. I have facilitated trainings and workshops on various subjects in Britain, Germany, Colombia, Turkey, South Korea, Greece, Macedonia, Georgia, Paraguay, Israel, and various other countries...

From 1998 until 2001, I also took part in an international Training for Trainers in Nonviolent Conflict Transformation at Kurve Wustrow in Germany. I am now part of the Nonviolent Change Training Team of Kurve Wustrow.

Besides having trained in nonviolence, I have trained in queering identities, gender identity and sexual orientation and in gender equality.

Training topics can include:

• Preparing for nonviolent (direct) action

• Consensus decision making

• Movement strategy and campaign planning (including the Movement Action Plan)

• Gender and queer perspectives in political groups

• Trauma and self-care for activists and political groups.

Get in touch if you want to know more.