Plan to Win

It’s handy when mainstream events include opportunities for social movement learning. Here’s my highlights for this year’s Melbourne Festival. The events vary in cost – you can reduce costs if you gather a group together. Add on a post-event discussion and you’ve got your very own activist education experience! Get in touch if you would [...]

Today is R U OK Day, a national day of action which aims to prevent suicide. The website states: ‘Staying connected with others is crucial to our general health and wellbeing. Feeling isolated or hopeless can contribute to depression and other mental illnesses, which can ultimately result in suicide. Regular, meaningful conversations can protect those [...]

A key focus of the Plan to Win project over the next few years is spreading the use of story-based campaign strategy among Australian social movements. Many social change battles are won or lost at the level of story. The recent hardening of offshore processing shows the persistence of one story about asylum seekers and [...]

The Melbourne Anarchist Bookfair took place in August at the Abbotsford Convent. There were stalls from a range of great groups, kid’s play space, handmade bunnies, and awesome Activist-Maisy colouring books (I may have been preoccupied by the kid-centric stuff as my 2 year old niece was in attendance). I ran a workshop on Decision [...]

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of training and mentoring around community organising theory and practices. I find this area really energising – I get to see people grasp the sense that they can have collective power, take on leadership and win significant change. In July I ran a workshop at Melbourne’s Green School, hosted [...]

The Melbourne Campaigner’s Network is a monthly gathering for campaigners, activists, and organisers to discuss ideas, exchange resources and discover new approaches to social change. Introduction to Story-based Strategy The October meeting is a report-back by Holly Hammond, Director of Plan to Win, on the Advanced Story-based Strategy Practitioners Training run by smartMeme in Oakland, [...]

Earlier this year I spent two weeks on the west coast of the US. I travelled there to participate in the Advanced Story-based Strategy Practitioner’s Training run by smartMeme. The training was fantastic – I’ll be sharing what I learnt at Plan to Win workshops in the near future. Alumni from the smartMeme workshop, June [...]

Hello! Welcome to Plan to Win, a new organisation to promote social movement learning in Melbourne, and beyond. This project takes a number of forms: working with campaigns, groups and organisations to build skills and develop winning plans; mentoring individual campaigners, activists and organisers; convening the Melbourne Campaigners’ Network so we can learn together and [...]