Six Elements

Overview

There are six elements of our approach to group transformation. They emerged out of our assessments of movement organizations we’ve participated in and worked with. Each element outlines a set of skills we have seen groups struggle with, believe are vital for healthy and strategic movements, and reflect a dimension of our facilitation tools and pedagogy.

The primary goals of our programing are to support movement groups and leaders to make powerful, strategic impacts on the world and shift movement culture in the following six areas:

1. Thriving Groups
2. Compelling Visions of Freedom
3. Building Power Across Difference
4. Study and Practice
5. Transformative Strategy
6. Cultivating Spirit & Faith

A number of political, spiritual, and educational traditions have shaped our approach, which continues to evolve as we learn through our work. We’d like to name a few of our more direct influences. Paulo Freire’s participatory education serves as our pedagogical foundation. Insights from the cannon of Black Feminism have shaped our orientation toward complexity, spirit, holding multiple truths simultaneously, and the interlocking nature of oppression. The concepts of self-limiting beliefs, mainstreams and margins, joining and differentiating, rank, and container-building, along with many of our tools and philosophies, come from Training for Change, and the ways they draw from Process Work. adrienne maree brown’s work on emergent strategy has shaped our orientation to North Stars and visions of freedom. Beyond the Choir named the tension between purpose and belonging. generative somatics helped ground us in the idea that we transform by practicing new behaviors until they become muscle memory, guided by the question “For the sake of what?” Tools for understanding direct action and leveraging people-power have been influenced by The Ruckus Society. Our integration of regenerative facilitation tools and Earth-based knowledge has been informed by Indigenous Sovereignty movements, and principles of Just Transition developed by Movement Generation.

We help groups build the skills to:

● Enter into generative conflict – Engage conflict in ways that generate more possibilities, greater connection, and fuller expression, instead of shutting those things down. This includes both moving past conflict avoidance and unhealthy attachment to conflict.

● Balance purpose and belonging – All groups fighting for justice are both striving to have a concrete impact on the world and create a community where members feel that they belong, amidst a dominant culture that they feel excluded from. When we don’t acknowledge these dual goals or bring intention to the ways we navigate them, our groups can fall out of balance, jeopardizing one for the sake of the other. We help groups make intentional choices about how they hold each.

● Navigate rank – Progressive and Left organizations often have positive democratic values, but remain part of an activist culture that hides, obscures, or avoids the reality of rank. We support clear and open conversations about formal and informal positions of power within the organization. This builds clarity on leadership, roles, decision-making, and accountability. We examine and work through the ways organizational rank intersects with broader social rank assigned by systems of power.

● Practice direct feedback and accountability – Working through barriers to giving feedback, holding people accountable, and being held accountable. Developing ways to hold each other accountable that feel fair, clear, and in line with group values.

● Balance joining and differentiating – More skillfully decide when to join (hold a sense of being on the same team, having each other’s backs) and when to differentiate (engage differences and tension, address power and privilege).

● Build group containers that hold risk & conflict – Build a sense of group trust and identity that allows group members to take risks, express strong emotion, and move toward conflict.

● Navigate mainstreams & margins ​- Described more fully in Element Three.

We help groups build the skills to:

● Find a North Star – If a group doesn’t have a clear vision, we support them to identify the visions already at play in room, lift up agreement and disagreement, and come to greater clarity about what they’re moving toward.

● Deepen collective vision – Build a greater sense of group ownership and co-creation over organizational vision. Help the group deepen the systemic scope and scale of their vision.

● Engage in visionary political education – Studying the analysis, visions, and strategies of groups and movements who either came before us or work alongside us can support our visions of freedom to be more robust, concrete, and rooted in context. We support groups to do the political education that will help bring their vision to life.

● Assess strategies, impacts, and interpersonal dynamics – Collective vision becomes a useful metric for assessing the group’s work. We help groups ask, “How are we embodying our vision now? Where can we grow? What’s holding us back?” and make plans to move forward based on that assessment.

North American Social Movements have benefited from generations of critical analysis around power that throughout the 2000’s coalesced into a workshop pedagogy commonly known as “anti-oppression.” At Wildfire, we celebrate these insights and advances, and also believe this pedagogical cannon can be reductive, shame-oriented, individualistic, and binary. Wildfire builds on this legacy with tools that we believe are holistic, layered, compassionate, and support agency and liberation in the face of complexity.

We help groups build the skills to:

● Renegotiate Mainstreams & Margins – Mainstream and margins is a framework developed by Training for Change for renegotiating how power is held within a group. We help groups to identify which behaviors, identities, values, and qualities are in their mainstream (at the center of group, seen, talked about, supported) and which are in their margins (at the group’s edges, not fully integrated or understood). We then help people in the margins to step into the role of renegotiating their relationship to power and people in the mainstream to support that renegotiation, building the skills of both to move into generative conflict, make requests, set healthy boundaries, and practice real accountability over time. A group’s mainstreams and margins shift as it evolves, and this work builds the capacity to identify and renegotiate power imbalances more broadly, recognizing that we all occupy both roles at different points in our lives and that we can hold each others’ wholeness in these kinds of conflicts.

● Deepen solidarity through political education – A greater understanding of revolutionary solidarity across history and context, including both successes and failures, supports us to more deliberately and effectively practice solidarity within our organizations. Combined with deeper analysis of how oppression functions, it also moves us to recognize that both solidarity and the leadership of oppressed people are not just moral but strategic necessities. Learning how systems of oppression intersect and reinforce each other and identifying shared impacts and opponents helps us see concretely how our liberation is bound together. We facilitate political education that supports groups to build more grounded and principled solidarity.

North American Social Movements have benefited from generations of critical analysis around power that throughout the 2000’s coalesced into a workshop pedagogy commonly known as “anti-oppression.” At Wildfire, we celebrate these insights and advances, and also believe this pedagogical cannon can be reductive, shame-oriented, individualistic, and binary. Wildfire builds on this legacy with tools that we believe are holistic, layered, compassionate, and support agency and liberation in the face of complexity.

We help groups build the skills to:

● Historically ground their work – Draw lessons from movements and traditions of resistance that have come before us.

● Deepen their analysis of power – Better understand how systems of oppression operate and how they came to be, in order to build more precise and effective strategies.

● Concretize their vision – Build clarity about what their vision of liberation looks like. More fully embody that vision in their work.

● Draw on strategic wisdom – Incorporate strategic lessons from historic and contemporary movements into their work.

● Integrate political education – Make political education a regular part of their work. Facilitate political education in ways that feel liberatory, empowering, and strategic.

We help groups build the skills to:

● Identify the impact they’re best suited to make – Assess their skills, strengths, resources, and weaknesses, along with what moves them and brings them to life. Examine this assessment in light of their political landscape, movement ecology, and long-term vision of system change. Move through the personal and interpersonal work of deciding what work they’re best positioned to do.

● Build strategies to make that impact – Make clear, measurable, right-paced strategic plans. Incorporate tools for effective campaigns. Move through generative conflict for the sake of strategic impact.

● Develop the skills that work requires – Build skills to implement their strategy. We offer experiential training in organizing, base building, facilitation, and direct action.

● Create a culture of assessment – Build the group praxis of reflection and assessment needed to be adaptive and effective in shifting contexts.

● Face self-limiting beliefs – Bold, visionary plans can bring up our fears and self-limiting beliefs. Our strategy work supports groups to both build powerful strategies and confront the fears they surface.

We help groups build the skills to:

● Develop and incorporate ritual – Rituals help us remember to remember. They can support us to feel and connect with bigger picture values and truths that oppression pushes us to forget and integrate those values into group identity. We help organizations build rituals that ground them in purpose, connection, and the bigger picture. This includes bringing music, song, and art into the work.

● Increase capacity to sit in contradiction – In our work, we face many dilemmas that require us to hold competing or contradictory truths. The more we are able to let those truths coexist, the more we can the hold the nuance, complexity and wholeness of ourselves, our world, and the people we work with. When we are attached to either/or thinking (either good or bad, right or wrong, oppressive or liberatory), we fail to see things as they are, and our work suffers. We support groups to get more comfortable with contradiction.

● Cultivate capacity to surrender – One such contradiction is that we find power when we surrender. When we let go of what is beyond our control, we free up our energy and capacity to work where can have an impact. We help groups release the fear and vigilance that keep them grasping for control and celebrate the sense of power and possibility that comes with surrender.

● Keep the real big picture in mind – We help groups remember that we are part of something bigger. Contextualizing our work in a long view of the span and scope of liberation offers us grounding and clarity and encourage us to move at a life-affirming pace. It helps us make meaning of victories, setbacks, pain, and healing.

● Draw on untapped resources and sources of resilience – There are immense resources in the wisdom of our bodies, the Earth’s elements, the particular ecosystems we’re part of, the ancestors at our backs, the future generations who will inherit what we build, and the world beyond what can be proven and measured. Opening and learning to connect to these resources can shore up our resilience, remind us that we are part of something bigger, and offer insights beyond our usual approach or perspective.

● Feel visions of freedom – Moving from thinking about what liberation means to feeling it in our bodies anchors us in the reality that we are fighting not just for ideas but for a world where our people get to feel and experience freedom. Our bodies know whatfreedom feels like, and we find deep, intuitive guidance when we remember how to listen to and trust them.

● Practice gratitude – Gratitude helps us open, soften, and release vigilance, doubt, and scarcity. We help groups bring gratitude into their work.

● Increase a sense of interdependence – Our society causes us to internalize alienation and isolation on a deep level. We forget the fact that we are fundamentally interdependent. Remembering how to feel our connections to each other, the earth, ancestors, and future generations deepens trust, resilience, empathy, and belonging.