Daniel Hunter
April 2004

Earlier this year Training for Change launched a new program called The Strategy Project to help activists with a burning question: how do we learn the art of strategy? Activists already have wisdom in building successful strategies for change -- just look at the growing number of social movements able to overthrow dictators, change domestic policies, and challenge multinational corporations. But things are still bad right now. We need to become more proactive and less reactionary. And it’s hard to take the time to learn from our past successes (and failures) and reflect on how we’ll change our approach.

To help activists with this process, Training for Change created The Strategy Project. Its goal is to pull together lessons from social movements around the world in building successful strategy. We’ll extract the key lessons and, with input from trainers around the world, create new tools/exercises (and uncover old exercises) to give activists a hand at the tough task of strategizing.

We see strategy as the bridge between where things are now (our analysis) and our vision of what the world can be (vision). Strategy takes us from here to there. It’s a challenging art. And it’s an art that more and more of us have to learn, so we can become more equipped at proactively challenging the ills around us.

The end result of The Strategy Project will be new training of trainer workshops specifically on strategy. Plus at the end of the project we will create a training manual on how to teach strategy, complete with new tools/exercises, theory on how to teach strategy, and information on other resources

• hired an intern (Aileen Nowlan) who is uncovering new training tools and theories about strategizing;
• created an experimental laboratory for creating new strategy exercises with a group of labor, student, peace & justice, and housing activists (we’ve already created and tried over eight new tools);
• had a major article on strategy written by George Lakey published in a new forthcoming strategy book Globalize Liberation, editor David Solnit (San Francisco: City Lights, 2004).
  So what’s next for the project? (May, June and July)
• In July, Daniel Hunter will make a major training trip to Australia to work with environmentalist groups in increasing their capacity to strategize;
• We will create a list-serve for strategy trainers to increase our outreach to share and learn strategy training success stories, tips, new tools, and ideas.