2023 Wildfire Fellowship
For the past three years of pandemic, our society has experienced corporate record profits alongside drastically deepening inequality, and increased isolation. All while an increasingly emboldened far-right reaches for the levers of power and the effects of climate change grow more frequent and devastating. We see the internal impacts of all this in our movements, organizations, and relationships: disconnection, isolation, intractable conflict, misplaced fear and anger. We need our movements to overcome these challenges now more than ever.
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. In 2023 we are continuing our in-depth custom facilitation with cross-sectoral movement groups, but are additionally meeting this challenge by expanding multiple new programs, including the 2023 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 2023 Fellowship Participant Orgs include:
- 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
Over the course of 2023, Fellows will come together for three intensive in-person 3-day workshops on assessing and shaping group dynamics. Between sessions, Wildfire facilitators will coach both 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 will build 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
