Tools

“Breakouts” or small group activities are a standard and versatile tool for in-person facilitation - and they’re part of our online facilitation toolkit, too! This video offers tips for setting up and running technically smooth online breakouts to help your group connect and do great work together.

In online spaces, our bodies often get left out or left behind, but they don’t have to! This video introduces theory, examples, and practical tips for bringing body-based activities into your online spaces.

“Brainstorming” goes beyond just making a list! This video helps facilitators lead online brainstorming activities that are effective, engaging, accessible, and secure. Tips include how to leverage online tools in ways that aren’t possible when brainstorming in-person.

How to set up many simultaneous one-on-one interactions in your online training group; great for skill-building, for applying a principle you've just taught, for community-building, or for raising individual awareness.

Online meetings and trainings connect people across geographical distances and engage people who might otherwise be excluded. However, access to reliable, high-speed internet varies widely. To lead inclusive and powerful online spaces, we must treat technology as an equity issue. As facilitators, we can’t control participants’ internet access, but we can use strategies to support connection and learning regardless of bandwidth. 

At protests, the police, counter-demonstrators or infiltrators, and angry passersby can start conflicts that disrupt the focus of the action, including provoking protestors into impulsive acts to discredit the cause. Having our own security or “de-escalators” at actions helps track and diffuse unstrategic conflicts, no matter the source, and support the action to be as effective as possible.

De-escalation can have different goals: ensuring physical safety, reducing the likelihood of violence, maintaining the desired tone or mood of an action, or reducing violence such that a fight can be worked out. Every situation is unique: there is no formula for dealing with hostility or conflict. When entering an action, it’s best to think through possible difficult situations and prepare ahead of time.

COVID-19 has created new challenges for facilitators and educators. Across the globe, people are being asked to lead groups online: teachers, trainers, professors, event managers, organizers, activists. Jeanne Rewa and Daniel Hunter swiftly wrote this booklet for this moment. Download free ebook or purchase print copies.

If you are used to training or facilitating people in person and are asked to train or facilitate online or over the phone, you might understandably feel a bit nervous. The good news is that most of what you already know and do as a facilitator in person also applies online and over the phone. With an understanding of the challenges and opportunities of this different medium, you can adjust the tools and approaches you already use, resulting in engaging and effective trainings and meetings online and over the phone.

Just like in in-person gatherings, people may try to “crash” your online gatherings. Online tech tools also allow people to mess with your spaces in different ways.  This handout names some of the ways that people might crash your online gatherings and ways to avoid and address them.

Modify these slides to use for your own meetings or use them as inspiration to create your own! See the speaker notes on each slide for how to use them.

There are many different tech options available for your remote team meetings, and all have different pros and cons. Here are just a few of the options available, with some of their pros and cons.

Some quick tips and guides for using Zoom breakout room features.

Follow these guidelines to make your online meeting/training content as accessible as possible to people with a range of eyesight abilities and vision challenges.

Some quick tips and guides for using Zoom breakout room features.

Spectograms can be used in online meetings and trainings! This video explains what a spectogram is, reasons why you might use one with a group, how to set one up, and ten different variations on a spectogram for online.

It is not unusual to find yourself facilitating what I call a “hybrid” online group. Instead of everyone connecting individually with their own devices (what I call individual connect format), or everyone but the facilitator together in one room (what I call group connect format), with a hybrid format you have some people connecting as individuals and some people connecting in groups...

This activity we learned from Ouyporn Khuankeaw, a trainer in Thailand who most often works with village development workers, women leaders, monks and nuns, and NGO staff. She finds that popular education/experiential education is easier for participants to get the most out of if they understand that it is actually a different model from the prevailing teacher-centered model.

A favorite tool! Maximize/Minimize Learning is a powerful tool to help participants take responsibility for their own learning and identify personal strategies for them to make the most of the training. Given that people have been taught not to take ownership of their own learning, this tool helps people take that ownership back.

By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule. - Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action

A quick tool for skill-building and practice, where everyone is involved. It's an elegant role-play format, one of our favorites, known as parallel lines (sometimes referred to as "hassle lines").

• desarrollar la habilidad de realizar actividades diferentes (tal como recabar fondos) • otorgar una nueva experiencia a los participantes (tal como la intervención no violenta)

This approach to strategizing serves bottom-up preferences in building social movements. In Starhawk's terms, it serves power-with rather than power-over, and is inherently democratic.

A quick exercise to help groups get an example of "What is strategy?" (as opposed to tactics and vision). All that's needed for this tool: a group and a blanket!

How to set up many simultaneous one-on-one interactions in your training group; great for skill-building, for applying a principle you've just taught, for community-building, or for raising individual awareness.

By creating a buddy system, facilitators can create an intentional support structure for participants, increasing the speed and depth of learning in the workshop.

Here's an alternative to lecturing about a topic when you want important information to be transmitted: have people find their own successful experience! This tool uses individual work, small groups and then large group to help the group access its own wisdom about a particular topic (you decide the topic based on the elicitive questions you use: fundraising, carrying out a successful protest, leading a group, overcoming a challenge).

We invented this in response to trainers asking us: what do you do with a group that is genuinely clueless about its racism (sexism/homophobia/ etc.)? We found it works with low-consciousness groups and has tremendous value for experienced activist groups, too.

How could young activists nonviolently overthrow Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic? This experiential tool shows the dynamics of mass noncooperation, and can be used by any group that wants to learn more about democratic power.

Those who most benefit from oppression want to convince us that they have the power and we don't. Nonviolent activism requires understanding that -- thankfully -- all power does not reside in the government or in multinational corporate power. So here's a tool adapted from Theatre of the Oppressed that offers a new perspective on power.

An activity to help groups look at mainstream/margin dynamics. This simple tool can uncover a deeper level of understanding of how mainstream/margin operates in that group.

What's a workshop without some games? Well.... anyways, here are some of our favorites gathered from training around the world. (also known as ice breakers, light and livelies)

Looking for fresh ideas for your closing circles? Here are some of our favorites that we have used with different groups! E-mail us with new closing circle favorites.

This activity is designed to provide participants with an opportunity to share information about themselves in a low-intensity activity and warm the group up for deeper conversations. It's also a great way to get the group energized!

Here’s a tool to learn about the four roles of social change activists: Helpers, Change Agents, Rebels, and Advocates. It’s goal is to build appreciation of the different roles, gaining empathy for all roles and different approaches to change.

Team types is a straightforward tool for participants to learn about themselves through identifying themselves within four different categories. These four types each represent different aspects of how people may operate in group settings.

Campaigns don't win all at once - they win through taking successful steps. Being able to break down the steps towards winning is a key skill for successful strategizing. This tool gives participants challenge and practice in setting stepping stones along the way and sequencing those to lead to a win.

A tool to connect many activists favorite topic -- tactics -- with larger questions of strategy. It uses tactical thinking to help connect to larger frameworks for social change.

A physical strategy tool: to assist groups in understanding more deeply the internal and external forces that impact their organization's success.

"Strategy -- in the face of impending war, financial crises, time crunch, staff changes or despair -- is impossible." Well, I don't think that's true, but certainly lots of us do carry that belief! So here's a one-hour tool that I've used when all of those factors were true! -- maybe it can work for you and your group, too.

This tool is designed to support participants to increase their comfortability with numbers and the state budgeting process, understand how budgets are an expression of our values, increase confidence their own programs to defend them and develop a greater understanding of the tension and pressure under legislators (empathy).

In demonstrations, vigils and anywhere else you are making a public statement, banners are terrifically useful. They tell who you are and either graphically or by their presence in a place, declare your intent. They also help you get a group together in a large gathering, or focus the TV cameras, as well as catching the eye of other, related groups that may want to associate themselves with you.

This tool is support participants in increasing their awareness around their own self care practices

While third-party nonviolent intervention and other peace team work is becoming more common, it's still a challenge: how to explain our work to others? Internationally, the framing of peacebuilding, peacemaking and peacekeeping is widely used. This tool helps fieldworkers relate that framework to their actual work in the field.

Participants practice expanding their vision and paying attention to what's around them. It's a quick skill development tool.

Three applications of nonviolent action: social change, social defense, third-party nonviolent intervention. How are they different? How does TPNI differ from the other types -- and how does that different show up in the field? This exercise addresses those questions.

How to help participants handle their anxiety about entering a violent confrontation? This tool is designed to walk participants through a series of increasing challenges to help them gain confidence in working in violent settings, to stay more aware in the midst of physical conflict.

What to do when confronted with a crowd ready to riot or an imminent police invasion? Well, if you're alone or only in a small group: get allies! In this exercise participants get to practice enlisting allies rapidly through quick glances and trying different techniques.

Here's a new tool designed by Training for Change that's being picked up around the world. It's goal: To give participants an insight into Third Party Nonviolent Intervention through participation in a scenario based on a real-life situation -- and still be lively! (Has been used in groups ranging from middle-school to college students to professional peace team organizations.)

In nonviolent action there are three applications: social change, social defense and third-party nonviolent intervention. Different movements may utilize different techniques depending on which of these applications they use. In this interactive teaching tool, we make use of "relay races" to assist participants to better understand these applications. Great for introduction to nonviolence, or a strategic planning workshop!

Use role-plays in your training? This skills arena gives participants maximum practice and feedback repeatedly.

This drill teaches security skills/concepts, cultural sensitivity, information and threat analysis, and decision-making. It's an energetic tool as the team gathers information to uncover whether it's becoming a target by the government in this extended role-play.

A major way to reduce burnout is to prepare people for the stresses, especially the stress of returning home after work away from home. This is a way to visualize issues of stress/trauma in the field and dealing with re-entry -- and with gummy bears! It is used for groups internationally, but can be adapted to most any setting where stress is a factor.

Looking for some role-play ideas for teaching accompaniment or intervention for unarmed bodyguards? Here are some ideas we collected for our training manual

Activists know to act. But they may not create the space to reflect. Reflection without action is impotent; but action without reflection is aimless. This tool gives participants a structured way to review “what they have been up to” – it’s a great intro to sessions on strategy, a simple tool, and a great way to catch themes carrying a group. Place this tool early in a strategy workshop to get a diagnostic read on the issues and struggles in the group.

This simulation/exercise serves to build community and give groups an experience of nonviolent action. Participants report it as a powerful tool to help them understand more fully the challenge and strategy of nonviolent action.

Frameworks can assist us in thinking about “what’s next” for us and contextualizing our day-to-day work. These three frameworks are for understanding how campaigns and movements change over time.

"Without a vision the people perish" | This tool increases unity in a group, opens its creativity, and assists protest groups to say what they're for as well as what they're against.

A political group we work with has a slogan, "Speak up before your silence is misunderstood." This tool gives participants a chance to practice confidence-building skills, especially concerning voice. It is easy to lead and we've had great success every time we lead it. A great tool to counter voicelessness!

An updated version of the commonly used "nonviolence spectrums." Use this tool to help a group looks at its diversity of opinion on issues related to nonviolence along with see unexpected commonalities and similarities.

A classic nonviolent training tool: quick decisions. In one minute, groups are challenged to reach a decision of an action to take based on some situation. Great for action basic workshops, consensus training, and affinity group preparation.

This strategy game explores ways of navigating difficult scenarios and gain perspective from multiple angles of an issue through a fictional country Eslandia, whose economy is faltering, ethnic tensions are high and terrorism is on the rise.

When putting together a workshop or meeting, there is much to consider. One consideration is the curriculum: does the content of each activity build on the previous in logical ways? Another is the people and their knowledge, situation, and preparation: does the design respond to the psychological needs of the participants in order to access the content?

A roleplay is an improvised dramatic enactment of a problem situation in order to find new and creative ways to respond. This may be done in preparation for an anticipated situation or for evaluating a past one.

Now a kinesthetic way of getting into the concept of comfort zones: step in and step out. This tool can be placed early in a workshop as a way of concretizing the concept of comfort zones -- as a bonus, this tool is a way to both talk about comfort zones and simultaneously builds the container as people actually step outside of their comfort zones through personal self-disclosure.

Back by popular demand, Berit Lakey's "No Magic Method": guidelines that will go a long way toward helping your group to meet both joyfully and productively.

Here’s a chance to stretch and practice creating new actions or tactics for your organization. It is about creativity. It can also be a chance to apply strategy lessons taught in earlier activities.

This tool is designed to provide a group challenge and give participants a shared experience of unequal conditions that can be used to extrapolate larger lessons about structural inequality and other experiences with oppression.

A fun game to support in starting conversations around campaign strategy by playing leapfrog- with a twist!

A tool to assist people to notice more in the midst of conflict. Great practice for training observers, protestors, and anyone wanting to help people practice staying aware in the middle of conflicts.

The intention of the diversity welcome is inclusion. It can be long or short. The more parts or aspects of what is present are named, the more the participants are likely to feel welcome in their diversity. It is a ritual, so don't be bothered by the repetitive phrasing. Take your time with it!

Going through this exercise can help you identify what tasks are essential to event planning and where there is opportunity for skill-building and leadership development. Follow the questions – when done you can appropriately delegate tasks or volunteer for roles based on a sense of the big picture, as well as the opportunities for skill building.

Street Speaking takes participants out of the training space and into the street to make a real time soap-box style public speech! In it we face our fears and practice the art of public speaking.

This tool is designed to give participants a quick experience of rank and privilege- especially economic and class privilege.

This exercise is meant as a follow-up to the Spectrum of Allies exercise. We develop arguments and one specific request to move a given constituency one wedge over to our side. We then roleplay the interaction.

This diversity exercise, also called "Crossing the Line" is geared to increase the group's awareness of difference that exists within the group as well as increase individuals awareness of their own issues with difference.

Here is a way to bring out unreflected wisdom about what makes actions effective. Depending on your goals, you may have your own generalization pieces of theory, but a great winner to help kick-start people thinking innovatively about tactics.

How to assist a marginalized individual or subgroup in your workshop to become integrated into the group, and also how to assist the mainstream in your workshop to learn more deeply about difference. This one is best done if you first of all experience it as a participant in a TFC workshop or with another qualified trainer.

Getting help can be hard. It runs counter to many of cultural values: independence, individuality, personal control, self-help, competition, to name a few. Activists tend to focus on skills on help others – but spend less emphasis on our own development. Getting help is necessary. If we are to grow, learn, not burn-out, and win then we need help. In this tool we create some space and time for people to think through how can they continue to learn and get help.

A physical exercise to help participants stand up for themselves -- literally. It's a great way to help margins stand up for themselves and mainstreams become more conscious and less stuck in shame.

A diversity exercise also called Step Forward/Step Back, this tool can go fairly deep considering it doesn't take much time. When placed well in a workshop, this can be a powerful exercise to help participants understand their rank and privilege or lack of it.

A tool from the field of adventure-based learning (ABL), puzzle squares is a group challenge that helps to look at leadership issues and communication within a team. The goal is simple enough -- create a square -- but the process elicits key conversation about how decisions get made in groups, and how to communicate effectively.

This tool is a quick, easy tool that is effective at helping groups understand the different roles in making groups work: different leadership skills. Its based on a piece of feminist theory that understands different leadership skills: Task and Maintenance.

Group stuck in defensiveness or self-judgement? This tool can help loosen them up by giving them a chance to practice handling attacks -- making visible the invisible process of judgementalism and offering a chance to work with it openly. This tool unsticks a group from the patterns that make it hard to learn anti-oppression and offers new behaviors to help out.

Whenever a new group forms people are always curious: Who else is in the room? This kinesthetic exercise allows peoples curiousity to show up and to learn about who is in the room. And, does it in a way that gets people working together.

In cross-cultural groups (like multinational or multigeographical groups) we find it useful to bring that cultural diversity into the room as a resource. This tool can be an early tool to help acknowledge that cultural diversity.

Here's a challenging exercise for practicing making decisions and communication. We've used it successfully in a number of settings -- US, Thailand, Sierra Leone, Canada -- and with groups of six people to over seventy! It's best for a middle-sized group -- around 15-25 people. In this adventure-based learning activity the challenge is fairly simple: to walk as a group from one place to another. The twist: the group must walk all in one line together with their feet touching their neighbors' feet the whole time

The simplest tool for cultural difference you'll ever lead! It's almost too simple to be it's own tool, but it works. The exercise: do a go-around where each person shares their full name and where it comes from. In a group from many countries and with wide cultural difference this inevitably opens up a whole field of difference. It's an easy, low-risk tool. Yet it can be powerful.

This tool is built to provide a group challenge and support in building team work. Scenario: Two people's movements in Mexico are growing rapidly in adjoining regions separated by a shallow river. The movements need to learn from each other how to deal with the repression from the armed forces. They agree to exchange teams of experienced people for a month so this mutual education can take place. Actually making the exchange, however, is highly dangerous because it means crossing the narrow river which has turned poisonous from polluting factories upstream. And the crossing must be made in the minutes between navy patrols which go down the river regularly. Can your entire team cross the river safely before the patrol comes?

Groups can love sharing stories of their worst meetings! Here participants get to act out the worst meeting ever, and then what a good meeting looks like. It's light and playful, and a great way to get into a discussion about how to make group meetings work well.

As a white TfC trainer who has concentrated on racial justice work for 25 years, where I started is not where I am today. As I’ve grown, learning what it means to do effective social change work, I’ve shifted my focus from doing anti-racism work with other white activists to supporting mutually-developed goals in active cross-race and cross-class coalitions.

Read about the direct education approach’s contrast to anti-oppression style trainings that exploit margins’ experience for the mainstream or that create a laundry list of do’s and don’ts for each experience. Two participants share their experiences from the ’06 Super-T to encourage increased awareness and greater inclusion of people with disabilities and transgender people in all types of workshops and trainings.

Often I’m faced with groups that are cutting back on longer anti-oppression workshops (moving from 3 days to 4 hours); or I see groups using the workshops as cover for their organization (“see? we offered a workshop!”). And what most frightens me is that as trainers we’re often agreeing to such constraints — knowing full well that we can’t build the safety to do deep work in two hours.

The human race groans under the oppressions of colonialism, war, racism, totalitarianism, and sexism. Corporate capitalism abuses the poor and exploits the workers, while expanding its power through the multinational corporations. The environment is choked. National states play power games, which defraud their citizens and prevent the emergence of world community. What shall we do?

I think we’re doing ourselves a huge disservice by abandoning playfulness. I would argue that far from being just a source of fun, play has huge benefits to us as learners, organizers, and activists. Playfulness feeds creativity and positivity, which in the long term helps us to be more effective and more sustainable. Those qualities are essential to success in our work for human rights, the environment and social justice.

Picture this: a group of activists who’ve been planning a direct action come together for a regular meeting. Tensions are high, because two members posted something on their e-mail list that offended a potentially key ally. At this meeting, the group has to decide, by consensus, what to do about the incident, and reactions to the incident are split in several directions. It’s not an easy meeting.

We know that subtle patterns of racism can add up to big strategic failures. Movements fail based on their inability to cross lines of race and class, maximize the participation of all genders, etc. It’s up to us as trainers to approach anti-oppression in a way that bridges this analysis with the movement goals of the groups we work with if we want them to see these concerns as relevant to the every day work of organizing.

As a facilitator, I am accountable to moving the group forward, not merely catering to the individual needs of the participants. By paying attention to what is “live” in a group and where it is at in its learning process, I can adjust my choices to emphasize points that will resonate the most.

We present some of the possibilities and limitations of using your B language as a trainer. As we get better at building broad-based social movement, multilingual spaces should become the norm, if they haven’t already, in our organizing. This reflection, stemming from our relatively limited experiences navigating between Spanish and English, is but a small part of the practice needed to recognize language as an intrinsic part of our politics, our vision, our strategies for change.

As a trainer offering workshops on issues of oppression, privilege, liberation, identity, cultural competency or any other themes that fall under those labels of “anti-oppression” or “diversity,” it’s really important to me that I offer people an opportunity to do more than just strengthen their intellectual analysis. I want people to get personal, to get real, to notice the choices they have at the level of their behavior, whether that be individual or organizational behavior. I don’t see success as giving people more language or concepts to talk about oppression or identity, if they walk away still not being able to see how their actions are serving a goal of inclusion or creating more barriers. Therefore, I want to take the time to learn as much as I can so that the way I approach the training is aligned with the learning that can contribute most to how a group needs to change at that moment in it’s development.

Ground rules as widely practiced are poorly understood and are often a waste of time. At worst they are pious rituals of political correctness designed to enforce mainstream norms. Too many facilitators limit themselves to using ground rules when other tools might work much better. Here’s why.

Most agenda reviews are a ritualized reading of a written agenda. It may take as little as five minutes (or less!), with a few logistical questions. However, when done with intention, agenda reviews can build safety, set tone, build rapport – even begin working conflicts that might otherwise get in the way of the workshop. Here are a few vignettes that may expand your sense of possibilities to make the review count!

Increasingly, trainers are inviting participants to take active roles in trainings, having keyed into the limits of a lecture-only approach. As the popularity of engaged training grows, all training approaches that aren’t lecture can get lumped together. But when we look closely, we see that different non-lecture approaches actually have different learning results. That is, the learning is in the details!

In multi-racial workshops I’ve led, activists are struggling with how to organize within an extremely tense environment. The following are five tips strengthened while at Beyond Diversity 101: Race – a workshop designed for Black and white participants, with the majority of our time spent in separate caucuses by race. I’m primarily writing this to support white trainers facilitating multi-racial groups.

Recent events, from major political set-backs to police violence against Black civilians and Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, have many of us on the left having to absorb the shock of hard news on an all-too-regular basis. As movement trainers, educators and organizers, it’s our job to help groups build up their skill and resiliency for weathering these moments.

In most organizing groups I’ve been witness to, class dynamics are rarely discussed in a ways that increases capacity for interacting across class differences. Even activists with a high level of sensitivity to race, gender, and sexuality are often still clueless when it comes to noticing how class influences their interpersonal relationships and organizational structures. So how do we build organizing cultures that encourage learning and accountability related to class?

Noncooperation is not enough. It's one thing to open up a power vacuum and another thing firmly to establish the democratic community we deserve. For that, the strategy must go deeper. We need to go beyond what has been done plenty of times in history—to overthrow unjust governments through nonviolent struggle—and create a strategy that builds at the same time as it destroys. We need a strategy that validates alternatives, supports the experience of freedom, and expands the skills of cooperation. We need a political strategy that is at the same time a community strategy, one that says “yes” to creative innovation in the here and now and links today's creativity to the new society that lies beyond a power shift. With the help and feedback of many activists from a number of countries I've created a strategic framework that aims to support today's activists, something like the way Otpur activists were supported by their strategy. I call it a strategy for a living revolution.