Fellowship 2023–24

The Wildfire Project knows that a crucial part of the way forward is deepening our capacity to build strong, resilient groups and relationships. Both our spirits and our strategies are calling us to transform the ways we relate to one another across lines of conflict, difference, and power. Throughout 2023 and 2024, we led the third Wildfire Fellowship – to spread the methodology we have honed for over a decade by training key movement leaders who are well positioned to apply these skills in the right places.

The Wildfire Fellowship is a multi-part, 8 month deep dive for 28 movement leaders to learn Wildfire’s core relational skills and tools, and apply them to help their organizations grow and reshape their group dynamics.

Frontline groups from Indigenous Sovereignty, Racial Justice, Labor, Housing, Climate and Gender Justice movements around the country are sending cohorts of 2-4 fellows each, to cross-pollinate lessons and relationships as they learn and build together. Strategically speaking, all the organizations participating in the fellowship are not just fighting back but fighting forward by building concrete power and shifting the balance of forces long-term. 

Our Fellowship Participant Orgs: 

  • Native Movement
  • NDN Collective
  • Dream Defenders
  • Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (CTUL)
  • Inquilinxs Unidxs
  • Lavender Phoenix
  • New Justice Project
  • CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities
  • Tending the Soil Coalition
  • 2023 Wildfire Fellows

 

 

2023 Wildfire Fellows

Over the course of 2023, Fellows came together for three intensive in-person 3-day workshops on assessing and shaping group dynamics. Between sessions, Wildfire facilitators coached fellows as well as the leadership of their organizations on how to best support their cohorts of fellows to engage and apply their learnings on a monthly basis, and offer ongoing team building and support for fellows to integrate their learnings back at their orgs.

 

The Content 

Fellows developed skills to support the health and effectiveness of their groups, including:

  • Generative conflict, challenging and resisting unhealthy conflict patterns
  • Effectively giving and receiving feedback
  • Healthy accountability practices
  • Integrating Spirit, Wildfire’s sixth element, into group culture
  • Identifying organizational mainstreams & margins
  • Renegotiating power dynamics
  • Acknowledging and navigating organizational rank
  • Initiating transformational/agitational conversations for generative purposes
  • Building group trust that supports taking risks for the sake of growth
  • Setting boundaries and making requests that serve purpose and connection
“The engaging workshops and exercises allowed us to drop our guards, helped us be creative, gave us space to lead ourselves, and encouraged us to work together. The Wildfire Project created a warm, open, and transformative space that was adaptive to our group and really geared toward meeting our actual needs.”

– Biola Jeje, CUNY Regional Organizer of New York Students Rising

The Wildfire Project is a fiscally sponsored project of the Social Good Fund, a U.S. tax-exempt 501 (c) (3) organization, taxpayer ID number is 46-1323531.

    

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