We blogged in January about the ‘How to do it’ conference about grassroots change that’s happening next weekend in London. There are still places available – book your free ticket here.
This weekend event brings together people from many different backgrounds to learn from each other and to work together on how to bring about concrete radical social change. It is concerned with how to improve and increase participation so that many more people can contribute to and help achieve our aims. It will involve people who research and study this area in our universities and also political activists and community organisers who are working to build participatory groups and organisations in their local areas. The question we all want to answer is “how to do it” and by coming together we can learn so much from each other and be inspired by each other’s experience and knowledge.
More here.
How to do it takes place at the King College London Waterloo Campus.
The full programme:
Saturday 9th April 2016
Please note: all of the sessions below have the event’s ‘standard format’: 10 minutes presentations, then split into small break out groups for discussion, followed by feedback at the end. If a session has a ‘non standard’ participatory format, this is stated in the summaries below.
| Session 1A | Therapy and the challenge of austerity |
| Room: 1.13 | From professional experience and our knowledge of empirical psychological evidence, we know that cuts have been toxic for peoples’ wellbeing and mental health. Responding to this, this session looks at how this campaign mobilises psychologists and psychological knowledge to make a case against further austerity policies. This session has its own participatory format.
Shinead Peacock-Brennan Psychologists Against Austerity |
| Session 1B | Deliberative democracy and citizens assemblies |
| Room: 1.16 | Deliberative democracy emphasises the importance of discussion, reasoning and dialogue in the process of decision-making. This session looks at different models and mechanisms through which the deliberative can be put back into democratic processes.
Emma Pole Canterbury Christchurch University Graham Smith University of Westminster Peter MacFadyen Independents for Frome |
| Session 1C | Learning from social movement theory: how to build effective collective action |
| Room: 1.20 | Sustainable changes to human society happen when we manage to convince a majority to change their minds. A relatively small number of committed activists taking visible action can actually swing the spectrum of opinion. When they’re deeply engaged and organising in communities, they can convince passive allies to get involved and support their cause, shifting friendly neutrals to become allies. Natasha shares lessons from Hahrie Han (US academic and author of ‘How Organisations Develop Activists’) and Carlos Saavedra (Organiser with the US DREAM movement and founder of Movement Mastery), drawing on their research, practice and theory.
Natasa Adams Tax Campaign |
| Session 1D | Digital communication and decision-making |
| Room: 1.21 | A structured brainstorming and collaborative design work session, based on the information conveyed during the initial presentation ‘Towards Liberatory Technology’ (LibTech). The tentative goal of this workshop is to develop a set of guidelines for those trying to initiate a LibTech movement in their community. The session has its own participatory format.Recommended reading: https://freelab.libtech.website/2015/10/28/liberatory-technology/.Petros PolonosFree Lab / LibTech |
| Session 1E | Sociocratic decision making – A deeper democracy |
| Room: 1.68 | A facilitated workshop on structured consent decision making processes as used by sociocratic practitioners in community groups and co-housing, as well as in small and large business and public services. We will also focus on how consent decision making and sociocracy are energised by the development of high quality relationships to produce shifts in culture that can bind groups together in greater solidarity and sustain organisation change. Sociocracy is a complete system (Open Source) but can be implemented in modular form. SociocracyUK serves a network of individuals and organisations around the British Isles, to support the growth in use and understanding of Sociocracy for smarter, more effective and more enjoyable organisations, collaboration, work and living. We share a common and passionately held view that ‘business as usual’, whether in business, in politics, and anywhere that human beings come together, not only needs to change, but will evolve or become obsolete in the face of better practices. The session has its own participatory format.Louis LoizouHealthy Power Alliance / Sociocracy |
| Session 1F | Mental health and diversity |
| Room: 1.70 | Details to be confirmed
Joel Vos and colleagues CREST, University of Roehampton |
| Session 2A | Action Aid: How to do campaigning |
| Room: 1.13 | Details posted soon.
Jon Ward Action Aid |
| Session 2B | The Teal Path to Thriving Organisations |
| Room: 1.16 | A Teal organisational style, unlike other styles, works like a living organism. It is agile, effective and responsive to evolutionary forces even within a complex ever changing environment. The three Teal breakthroughs, which distinguish it from other forms are: self-management, expressing evolutionary purpose and promoting wholeness are work. This workshop will look at how adopting the Teal approach can support activist and community groups to work better together and create radical social change. During the workshop we will: 1.Discover common pitfalls to getting things done experienced by the participants. 2.Explore what Teal is and how it can address those pitfalls. 3.Explore and share Teal practices that can be used to support the participants current ventures. (How, What, When)
Morya Short Teal for Start-ups |
| Session 2C | Putting the participatory into participatory budgeting |
| Room: 1.20 | Participatory budgeting (PB) is a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making, and a type of participatory democracy, in which ordinary people decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget. PB has been described as a significant area of innovation in democracy and local development, and as an instrument of decentralisation that successfully avoids fragmentation. However, in recent years, the emergence of these new participatory mechanisms in towns and cities has given rise to a conflict between ‘the old protagonists of local participation’ and the new citizens invited to participate. This session asks: how can we create progressive and effective political participation in PB? This session has its own participatory format.
Catherine Wilson – Trust in PB. School of Education, Durham University Phil Jones – Community-led cultural commissioning: reflections on an intervention University of Birmingham Shealagh Pearce Principal Area Action Partnership Coordinator at Durham County Council |
| Session 2D | New Perspectives in Organisational Culture Change |
| Room: 1.21 | Statistically most change programs do not work well. It is said this is because people resist change. Actually this is a myth (after all wouldn’t most people rather change their workplaces to be more humane, enjoyable and democratic?). What people resist is not change itself, but the imposition of new systems without being consulted or involved in the process, however well-intentioned the change may be (so all you activists out here, please take a note of this!). For change to work, those affected by it need to be asked, and invited to co-create the change together. Easily said, but how do you do that at scale, in larger organisations, ensuring everyone is engaged positively in the process? This session will explore the problem (e.g. why has Zappos holacracy adoption faltered?) and potential solutions to the challenge in this experiential participant-led workshop.This session has its own participatory format.
François Knuchel CATERFLY |
| Session 2E | Street theatre as a method of activism |
| Room: 1.68 | Danny has been creating theatre in public spaces for many years and this session introduces those who create street theatre, with a view to an intervention at this event. Full details to be confirmed.
Danny Shine |
| Session 2F | How to increase participation in groups (1) |
| Room: 1.70 | Unequal, hierarchical societies divide people. Simply put, those at the top get more access to resources and justify this through narratives around their own exceptionalism and how disadvantaged groups are less deserving. There is a long history to this. It manifests as racism, classism, sexism etc, which get played out (often unwittingly or unwillingly) against others and ourselves (causing depression, isolation, discouragement).This workshop uses participatory methods to give participants an opportunity to begin to explore, articulate and unpick these divisions and their impacts on our activism. This session has its own participatory format.
Pat Gregory Cardiff Transition Louise Gray Cardiff Transition |
| Session 3A | Direct action: how and why |
| Room: 1.13 | Research shows that direct action is a critical component to successful civil resistance, but how can it best be designed to maximize effectiveness and create dilemmas for opponents? This workshop looks at the theory and practice of direct action design.
Roger Hallam Kings College London Others TBC |
| Session 3B | Participatory education and organizational forums |
| Room: 1.16 | Education when participatory is empowering and creative. This session brings together examples of groups engaging in participatory education and look at the various ways in which participatory education can be organised from one-off debates to long-term educational design.
Mike Neary Social Science Centre, Lincoln TBC London Free University TBC Bricklane Debates Neus Beascoechea Segui Kingston University |
| Session 3C | Bottom up unions: how to create a rent strike |
| Room: 1.20 | Casualised workers and exploited tenants in London are now creating their own community-based unions. Major successes have been achieved over the last year, giving London the living wage. This session looks at how to create effective collective action through organising these new unions.
Andy Hiles Unite, North Yorkshire David Dahlborn and Roger Hallam UCL Cut the Rent Campaign Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) Couriers Branch |
| Session 3D | Rapture: sex, music and radical participatory action research |
| Room: 1.21 | Sex and relationships have a big impact on young people’s lives. For most young people in the world, apart from pornography, getting information about sexual pleasure can be difficult. Online sex education reaches millions of young people in countries like Kenya, where sexual health is poor and people cannot access trustworthy information. But in order to change norms and behaviour, it is essential to engage with a reality of gatekeepers and disillusioned young people who distrust politicians, officials and NGOs. Popular culture – especially music – can be an effective way to reach young people. Music can subvert but also reinforce sexual and gender stereotypes, and artists that disseminate NGO messages often lack credibility and respect within the industry. This session asks: how can you engage young people on sexual health? The session follows its own participatory format.
Pauline Oosterhoff Institute of Development Studies |
| Session 3E | Free Session |
| Room: 1.68 | This is a free session. We have left this space empty in order for further spontaneous workshops to be planned on the day. If you want to use this space at this time, please see the sign-up sheets. |
| Session 3F | Food and the environment: spreading the word |
| Room: 1.70 | Campaigning around climate change and food issues are growing areas of vital activism. In the present context, this session looks at to examples of how campaigns have been set and organised in this area.
Annie Randall UCL Fossil Free Campaign Bearta Ciupinska Awakening Compassion Thomas Hamre |
Sunday 10th April 2016
| Session 4A | Migrants Organise: migrants and refugees acting for justice |
| Room: 1.13 | Migrants Organise is a platform where refugees and migrants organise for power, dignity and justice. We develop leadership and open up spaces for relational, organised participation of migrants and refugees in public life.This session looks at our approach to community organising. We will focus on how we grow power; build common ground amongst diverse people; connect people through mentoring and training; encourage our members to speak out on campaigns aiming to to end indefinite detention and the national refugees welcome movement which we are part of.
Ffion Wyn Evans and other staff/volunteers from Migrants Organise (TBC) |
| Session 4B | How to network at scale |
| Room: 1.16 | How do we bring networks together to communicate and combine to make political change? This session draws on experience from Lowimpact.org and Radical Assemblies. What is the role of network switching, and the movement between radical networks?
Graham Jones East London Radical Assembly Dave Darby Lowimpact.org / Community Supported Everything Barnaby Flynn Global People Power (TBC)
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| Session 4C | Community participation in Afghanistan, Philippines and Bolivia |
| Room: 1.20 | Significant and creative innovations in bottom up community organisation are being made by poor and marginal communities in many parts of the world. This session looks at specific instances of these efforts and seeks to share lessons for participatory organisation.
Erika Lopez Franco University of Sussex Mary Dobbing Voices for Creative Non Violence UK |
| Session 4D | E-campaigning and the role of media |
| Room: 1.21 | Online campaigning is now a vital means of political communication. This session looks at how social media can be used to convey radical messages effectively. It covers the processes in news transfer, and the relationship between online and offline knowledge.
Sharon Coen Salford University Dwayne Raymond FairSay The E-Campaigning Forum
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| Session 4E | Energy co-ops: how to organise community energy |
| Room: 1.68 | Energy policy is one of the areas of the European Union’s further integration. Aspirations to create an internal energy market are reflected in development strategies that aim to decarbonise economies and popularise renewable energy sources. However, energy policy and climate change management are not only technological issues. Energy transformation can result from changing the structures of markets, industries and production, as well as whole societies. A shift in development policy gives a chance for grassroots movements that are willing to improve local living conditions, such as caring for the environment and tackling energy poverty. Energy transition could be an inspiration for local development strategies in Europe, as a model for encouraging the citizens to engage in local activism for good and common purposes.
Maria Skora Humboldt-Viadrina Governance Platform
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| Session 4F | The resurgence of the political: rebellion in the city |
| Room: 1.70 | The 2011 worldwide social protests voiced a dissensus towards the theatre of everyday policy making, performed by political actors and various interest groups in their effort to reproduce the current order, termed by Rancière as ‘politics’. In this session, we turn to Tel Aviv, where lower income Israeli families, gentrifiers, labour migrants and African asylum seekers have reached the brink of urban riots. This predicament has given rise to various activists groups and here we focus on two: ‘The Activists Executive’ and ‘Power to the Community’. We ask: are the city’s forgotten margins the locale for reclaiming ‘the political’?
Eran Tzin Tel Aviv University Gal Levy Tel Aviv University
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| Session 5A | Spiritual organization and activism |
| Room: 1.13 | This session involves a discussion of grassroots anti-authoritarian spiritual and shamanic associations. This workshop brings together academic discussion of radically individualized religion with those who are practicing in this milieu (within various spiritual contexts) in a framework of equality and respect, to consider the potential of this kind of ‘bottom-up’ spiritual activity.
Claire Wanless Open University Jules Christie Independent
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| Session 5B | Organising independent political parties |
| Room: 1.16 | New political parties are now developing based on local community assemblies and activism. This session looks at exciting examples from Frome and Take Back the City in London.
Peter MacFadyen Independents for Frome Simon Thorpe Take Back the City, London |
| Session 5C | Perspectives and tools for overcoming divisions in movements |
| Room: 1.20 | Effective action on many critical issues, such as the destruction of the environment, requires united and broad-based mass movements. The biggest impediment to all progressive movements has been division (whether externally-provoked or spontaneous), where a section of humanity comes to view another section as their major problem, diverting both from achieving their common interests. Preventing and overcoming division then becomes vital for the future of humanity.Emotional damage, from growing up under oppression, leaves people vulnerable to being co-opted into the oppressive system. Blaming ‘the bad people’ misunderstands the problem and prevents solutions. Overcoming divisions requires understanding the structures; how mistreatment and oppression work at the emotional level, and how to undo this. This session follows its own participatory format.
Karl Lam Independent writer on social and political change Alima Adams |
| Session 5D | Citizens, platforms: creating a new constitution |
| Room: 1.21 | Assemblies for Democracy (consisting of activists, facilitators and interested members of the public) is currently engaged in a process to create a Citizens Convention on the Constitution. In the run up to that, our aim is to get citizens involved in thinking about what kind of constitution they would like to be governed by. This is a fun, co-creative workshop based on the question: What would you like to see in a Citizen’s Constitution for this country? We look at what a Constitution is, how historically they have been created, what they presently look like and how there are new global initiatives for Citizens to crowdsource their own constitutions (with varying degrees of radicalism) in Iceland, Canada and Ireland. This session follows its own participatory format.
Andy Paice and other members Assemblies for Democracy |
| Session 5E | Organizing on the margins: migrants and the urban poor |
| Room: 1.68 | The migrant crisis has seen as surge of bottom up activism responding this dire situation. This session looks at several case studies of how activists and migrants have responded by creating their own bottom up networks and associations with particular reference to activism amongst the migrants at Calais.
Dan Mercea City University James Elison Calais Migrant Solidarity / Loughbrough University |
| Session 5F | Community politics of GLC (Greater London Council) |
| Room: 1.70 | ‘A Greater London’ is a project that aims to retell the story of GLC of the 1980s in a way that engages current campaigners on London issues (http://glcstory.co.uk/). During this period, the institution experimented with new forms of participation in areas such as planning, arts funding and health research. While by no means perfect, it stands in contrast to the highly centralized and top-down governance of the last 30 years. For younger residents of the city, it is hard to imagine what this might have looked or felt like.
Deborah Grayson Former-GLC staff Hilary Wainwright (TBC) Former-GLC staff |
| Session 6A | How to organize urban assemblies |
| Room: 1.13 | Since the 15-M movement began in 2012, Spain has organised hundreds of local assemblies where communities are opposing austerity and politics. This workshop explores the construction and organising principles of these actions, drawing upon the experience of Spanish activists.
Simon Thrope Take Back the City Activists from Spain TBC |
| Session 6B | How to map for justice |
| Room: 1.16 | The spatial dimensions of campaigning, communities and collective actions form a significant but often overlooked aspect of change. From the occupation of space through protests, to the appropriation of land in rural societies, to the commodification of urban spaces, this workshop asks how maps and zoning are used as a tool of oppression, and how hacked maps can be used as a tool of liberation.
Doug Specht CAMRI, University of Westminster Other Speakers TBC |
| Session 6C | Facilitation: how to do it better |
| Room: 1.20 | Good facilitation is vital in enabling groups to work well and make decisions effectively. This session looks at what is involved in good facilitation. What are the components and mechanisms for good facilitation?
Jake Colman and other members of the collective (TBC) London Roots Collective Seeds or Change (TBC) |
| Session 6D | How to increase participation in groups (2) – meetings |
| Room: 1.21 | This is a free session. We have left this space empty in order for further spontaneous workshops to be planned on the day. If you want to use this space at this time, please see the sign-up sheets.How can we create better participation for bottom up meetings? How can participation be increased through the structure of the meeting and various methods of consensus decision-making? This session draws upon the experience of the Occupy protests in various contexts.
Emma Pole Canterbury Christchurch University Anastasia Kavada CAMRI, University of Westminster |
| Session 6E | Power, participation and civic organization (the nature of power) |
| Room: 1.68 | How do we deal with the issue of power? This session explores the theoretical and conceptual ideas upon which this event is based. This includes contrasting top down and bottom up state development projects that recognise diversity, and looks at what we mean by ‘participation’ in these contexts.
Swetha Roa Dhananka India Institute Nicky Dean London School of Economics Brian Schmitt University of Cergy-Pomtoise |
| Session 6F | Participation, gender and sexual diversity |
| Room: 1.70 | Details to be confirmed
Joel Vos CREST, University of Roehampton
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| Session 7A | Cultural media: community projects |
| Room: 1.13 | People in communities around the country are creating their own community-based projects, including independent cinemas, crowd funded local newspapers, and urban food growing projects. In the session, practitioners share their experience on how to get started.
Anthony Killick Edge Hill University / Liverpool Radical Film Festival / Small Cinema Adam The Bristol Cable Newspaper, Bristol Sarah Pugh Shift Bristol 20CIC Carla Cruz Artist and Research Associate for Goldsmiths University of London |
| Session 7B | Empowering and ethical nudging – a guide for activists. |
| Room: 1.16 | “Nudging” is a term used for the use of behavioural economics andpsychology in policy and social change. It is often viewed suspiciously by activists who see it as “spin” or “psychological manipulation” but increasingly people are using this work for social good. Behavioural insights helps us understand our own and others ‘irrationilities’ and why people might not change even though they agree/know they ought to/want to. This offers essential information for any activist who wants to understand how to work more effectively with their fellow humans for radical change. This session will include a half hour talk followed by questions, discussion and workshop.
Rachel Lilley Aberyswith University |
| Session 7C | Free Session |
| Room: 1.20 | This is a free session. We have left this space empty in order for further spontaneous workshops to be planned on the day. If you want to use this space at this time, please see the sign-up sheets. |
| Session 7D | Revolt in the city – global examples |
| Room: 1.21 | What were the common features from the 2011-12 global Occupy movements and the Arab Spring? This session draws upon the experiences of activists in Tel Aviv, Gezi Park and others, with a view to being more effective in the future. This session also looks at the role of bazaars as a form of bottom up political organisation.
Basak Tanulku Independent Muhammad Salman Khan University of Middlesex |
| Session 7E | Participation as European citizens |
| Room: 1.68 | This is an interactive session exploring what kind of community we want to live in, and whether being part of the EU helps. This includes looking at the environment, health, and various social aspects by playing a game that we have developed for the session. Our aims are to get people to think about the consequences of Brexit, of making sure they are registered to vote (and making arrangements in case they are going to Glastonbury this year which falls on the election day) and to share our Big European Citizens’ Survival Guide for living in the UK, which is a great resource everyone can benefit from. This session follows its own participatory format.
Bella Kosmala New Europeans Tamara Flanagan New Europeans |
| Session 7F | Bringing it all together |
| Room: 1.70 | This session brings together everyone who is interested in taking the ideas from the conference and moving towards action, including organising further events and an online presence to sustain the momentum of our discussions.
Event organisers |
