Short provocative sessions for strategists, campaigners and organisers.
Does your team need some fresh ideas to inspire your campaigning, organising and movement building?
These short taster sessions are designed to enliven team meetings, giving you new perspectives and frameworks to apply. Each session is a conversation guided by Holly Hammond, drawing on the source book and making connections with your work.
Book an exploration of one of these books, or a series of all four:
- Jonathan Mathew Smucker, Hegemony How To: A Roadmap for Radicals
- Mark & Paul Engler, This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century
- Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
- Patrick Reinsborough & Doyle Canning, Re:Imagining Change: How to use story-based strategy to win campaigns, build movements, and change the world
Sessions will be one to three hours long, depending on the focus and the size of the group. Fees are charged on a sliding scale depending on means.
Community of practice gatherings, such as cross-organisation networks, book clubs or groups of friends, are also welcome to book a session. If you’re intrigued but you can’t gather a crew there’s potential to book a one-to-one session.
These sessions will be available from October to December so get in touch to book in.
It’s like bookclub but you don’t need to have read the book – Holly definitely has! See below for more information about each book.
Jonathan Mathew Smucker, Hegemony How To
A roadmap for radicals. Hegemony How-To is a practical guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about questions of power, leadership, and strategy. Hopeful about the potential of today’s burgeoning movements, long-time grassroots organizer Jonathan Smucker nonetheless pulls no punches when confronting their internal dysfunction. Drawing from personal experience, he provides deep theoretical insight into the all-too-familiar radical tendency toward self-defeating insularity and paralyzing purism. At the same time, he offers tools to bridge the divide between anti-authoritarian values and hegemonic strategies, tools that might just help today’s movements to navigate their obstacles—and change the world.
Order Hegemony How To on Book Depository now.
Mark & Paul Engler, This is an Uprising
How nonviolent revolt is shaping the twenty-first century. From protests around climate change and immigrant rights, to Occupy, the Arab Spring, and #BlackLivesMatter, a new generation is unleashing strategic nonviolent action to shape public debate and force political change. When mass movements erupt onto our television screens, the media consistently portrays them as being spontaneous and unpredictable. Yet, in this book, Mark and Paul Engler look at the hidden art behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest.
With incisive insights from contemporary activists, as well as fresh revelations about the work of ground-breaking figures such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Gene Sharp, and Frances Fox Piven, the Englers show how people with few resources and little conventional influence are engineering the upheavals that are reshaping contemporary politics. Nonviolence is usually seen simply as a philosophy or moral code. This Is an Uprising shows how it can instead be deployed as a method of political conflict, disruption, and escalation. It argues that if we are always taken by surprise by dramatic outbreaks of revolt, we pass up the chance to truly understand how social transformation happens.
Order This is an Uprising on Book Depository now.
Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy
Emergent strategy is rooted in emergence science, where “complex patterns and systems arise from relatively simple interactions, such as the murmuration of a flock of birds” says brown. In the book, brown builds upon ideas from writers and philosophers such as Octavia Butler, Margaret Wheatley, and Grace Lee Boggs. She shares core principles of emergent strategy such as adaptation, decentralization, interdependence, creating possibility, resilience, transformative justice, and nonlinear change.
“It feels especially important now that we are in this period of immense change, where a lot of suffering and oppression is being unveiled,” says brown. “If we continue to pretend change is a linear process we can control, we will miss out on what’s available to us now. Instead of reacting to current conditions and trying to push the pendulum back towards us, how can we use this opportunity to turn all of society towards justice, liberation, equity and equality?”
Order Emergent Strategy on Book Depository now.
Patrick Reinsborough & Doyle Canning, Re:Imagining Change
How to use story-based strategy to win campaigns, build movements, and change the world. Providing resources, theory, hands-on tools, and illuminating case studies for the next generation of innovative change-makers, this unique book explores how culture, media, memes, and narrative intertwine with social change strategies. Re: Imagining Change is an inspirational inside look at the trailblazing methodology developed by the Center for Story-based Strategy. This new, expanded second edition includes even more examples from the front lines of social movements and links the reader with an online tool kit to help change the stories they care about most.
Order Re:Imagining Change on Book Depository now.
Disclosure: Ordering books via the Book Depository links on this page results in a small credit being passed along to Plan to Win. This will be used to purchase more books for the activist library, to inform future training and mentoring and to be borrowed by folks. Of course, it’s a much better idea to support your local independent book seller (especially movement institutions such as New International Bookshop) – but if you do shop online your use of these links is really appreciated.