Building Communities of Resistance: Reflections from grassroots organisations around the world
This report is the result of a collective effort to pause, look inwards, and reflect on the process of transformative change. It collates a series of insights, challenges, and lessons learnt by and with ten grassroots organisations from Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. These organisations work closely with different communities – refugees, LGBTIQ+ people, farmers, domestic workers, girls, and adolescents – and engage in movement-building work.
The report summarises their approaches to co-creating knowledge with communities and their principles and strategies of storytelling, meaningful participation and active listening, and building the collective power of communities and movements. It highlights our shared commitment to support marginalised groups towards realising their change agendas in a participatory, equitable, and democratic manner.
We hope that the stories and insights here serve as food for thought for people working in the ‘for purpose’ sector, either self-organising or supporting communities on the ground to transform unjust realities and bring about social change. We are not offering answers or solutions to the struggles that we and our partners identified during our collective reflection process, but we do believe that there is power, hope, and inspiration in knowing that we are not alone in our work, that there are many others all over the world asking themselves the same questions.
We hope that the report stimulates others who are walking on similar paths and going through common struggles and encourages them to embark on their own reflection processes.
Read the report here.
In addition to the analytical summary, you can also read the reflections on their journey and change process by four of the project partners - in Guatemala & El Salvador, in Nigeria, in Jordan, and in India: Stories of Participatory Reflection and Transformative Change.