People Power Training

Facing the limits of protest when the war in Iraq began, Amanda has been on a quest to understand how we can make a difference. This has seen her set up innovative community organisations like Get Up and Sydney Alliance, sustain decades long conversations with change makers around the world through her ChangeMakers podcast, and led her to new thinking about how to make a difference in a series of books about people power and social change.

In speaking about social change, one of Amanda’s strengths is her ability to link insights and lessons to stories. In this podcast with the ABC Big Ideas program she explores how her journey with bipolar informs how she makes change. In this memoir published by Griffith Review she talks about her experiences at Sydney Alliance and GetUp shape how she sees change as big and small.

Amanda speaks and runs teaching, training and workshops about how to make a difference. Some of the topics she covers include:

• Community organising approaches and skills: Amanda is well versed in the community organising pedagogy and has added to it over the years, with content on relational meetings, power, power analysis, public and private, action, evaluation, qualities of leadership, listening and table talks, research-action and developing issues.

• Coalition building: drawn from her research in Power in Coalition, from building the Sydney Alliance and from participating in endless attempts to build collaboration across difference, Amanda trains on the elements of coalitions, the many practices and features of coalition building, the five core lessons of successful coalitions and the kind of trade offs that coalition building often requires between building democratic capacity and achieving social change. 

• The paradoxes of public life in how we make a difference: Amanda is working on a book that argues for us to change how we think about making a difference. She teaches and trains about these paradoxes and how they can shape how we make a difference – such as the idea of big and small, power over and with, public and private, sameness and difference and more.

• The art of negotiation: Amanda hosts a half day training that begins with experiential learning to reflect on strategies for how we negotiate change with others

• People power strategies and the ecology of people power: Amanda’s book about people power is being used to run training that unpacks different strategies for engaging people in collective action such as playing by the rules, mobilising, organising, prefiguring and running for office. This training is both reflective and suggestive, allowing participants to unpack how all these strategies have their strengths and weaknesses, how they can work together and how they clash, and how they can cohabitate to produce successful social change in the city and beyond.

• Sameness and difference: This training offers a different way of thinking about the place of identity and difference in public politics, exploring the paradox of sameness and difference as a way to make space for difference but also find solidarity with others.

• Building a relational culture in our organisations and movements: This training applies the strategies of people power to how we work together in organisations and movements. It explores how we can change our organisations to be less bureaucratic and more relational, and includes how we can use relational meetings and relationship driven practices in what we do everyday.

These sessions can be run separately in 90 min-2 hour workshops, half-day and full day trainings and in residential. They are best when they are co-created with organisations and communities, so the teaching and stories are designed to connect with participants. To find out more get in touch via the contact page.