Guide cover - Title reads 'Just Power A Guide for Activists and Changemakers'. There is a woman speaking into a loudhailer. The speech bubble coming out of the loudhailer contains the title. There are rainbow colours surrounding her.

Just Power: A Guide for Activists and Changemakers

By

Introduction

If you are an organiser, a movement builder, a community leader, an ‘artivist’, a student, a social justice NGO worker, a philanthropist, or someone from any other part of the social change ecosystem – this Guide is for you!

This Guide, Just Power: A Guide for Activists and Changemakers, by JASS is based on decades of experience in and alongside movements, and is by and for change-makers of all kinds.

Based on two decades of movement accompaniment and strengthening, the Just Power Guide combines provocative thinking and concepts with tried and tested activities for groups. Several years in the making, this cutting edge Guide supports activists, organizations and movements to be strategic as they navigate increasingly hostile contexts. It provides movement allies and donors with conceptual frameworks and analysis to understand what movements are facing and what they need.

This Guide is intended for use by a wide range of people and groups. We believe that there are many roles to play in terms of creating change. We think about this in terms of an ecosystem, in which movements define and lead change and many others contribute and play important roles.

As you think about how you want to use the Guide, it is important to start with what you bring, what you want to learn more about, and what you want to change in the world. Chapter 1: Getting Started will help you think about how best to use and adapt the Guide for your interests, context, and group.

We hope that this Guide will provoke thinking and questioning – some that may be uncomfortable – about received ideas about change, about power and relationships, about movements, about who has expertise, and about strategy. This is the nature of critical thinking and critical consciousness – to expand the parameters of our understanding and deepen our practice of liberation.

Contents

Introduction
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Theme 1: Starting with Ourselves
Theme 2: Imagining the Future We Want
Theme 3: Roadmaps to Change
Theme 4: Who are ‘We’?

Chapter 2: Naming the Moment
Theme 1: Between Crisis and Mobilisation
Theme 2: Global Patterns, Systemic Shifts
Theme 3: Learning from History
Theme 4: Cracks Where the Light Comes In

Chapter 3: Making Sense of Power
Theme 1: What and Where is Power?
Theme 2: Multiple Forms and Arenas of Power
Theme 3: Systemic Power
Theme 4: Power and Interconnected Identities
Theme 5: Power, Conflict, and Violence
Theme 6: Analysis to Strategy

Chapter 4: Identity, Intersectionality, and Power
Theme 1: Identity, Power, and Privilege
Theme 2: The Personal is Political
Theme 3: Identity, Power, and Transformation

Chapter 5: The Power of Narratives
Theme 1: What Are Narratives?
Theme 2: How Do Narratives Affect Us?
Theme 3: Invisible and Systemic Power in Narratives
Theme 4: Unmasking and Transforming Narratives
Theme 5: Creating Transformational Narratives

Chapter 6: Power and Strategy
Core Ideas
Theme 1: What is Strategy?
Theme 2: Connecting Analysis to Strategy
Theme 3: Context and Moment
Theme 4: Building and Exercising Power
Theme 5: Engaging and Resisting

Case Studies

UBUNTU: Rural women mobilise in South Africa
PEKKA: A grassroots women’s movement in Indonesia
COPINH: Guardians of the River in Honduras

Access Resources

Website and E-Book

Watch Videos

Watch Video – Introductory Video to the Guide
With Indonesian and Spanish subtitles.

Watch Video – How to Navigate the Guide

Watch Launch Video

Note for Facilitators

As you review this Guide and decide what you could do with it and how it might help you design a session, a workshop, or an action-learning journey, here are some points to consider.

  • Be adaptive
    This guide is not a recipe to follow. Like good cooking, it will invite you to spice it up, and adapt it to your own context, issues, and participants. We offer a sequence of chapters, tools and activities built on our experience, but you will want to choose what you want to do, how you want to do it, and in what order.
  • Be experiential
    Popular education is most effective when grounded in people’s own experience and practice, through cycles of storytelling, critical reflection, and action. Three case studies are offered to help deepen and apply learning, but you can substitute your own cases and issues, and of course circle back to practical implications for action in your context.
  • Be creative
    Deep and transformative learning is not only about cycling between action, reflection, theory, and experience, but also about allowing ourselves to feel and understand with our full beings, including our hearts, minds, and bodies. We invite you throughout to use creativity, art, storytelling, music, dancing, and drama to deepen analysis and learning.
  • Be power-aware
    The design and facilitation of learning is never power-neutral. Develop practices of personal and group reflection to become aware of the power you carry, the power dynamics and relationships in the groups and organisations involved, and the power and leadership you seek to invite, catalyse, and nourish through the learning process.

Finally, a note on virtual vs in-person facilitation. The Guide is designed primarily with face-to-face workshops in mind, as there are many benefits to being physically present in FPE processes, to deepen collective understanding, solidarity, and action. Yet, as the Covid pandemic first demonstrated, many activities can be adapted to virtual spaces. We include links to some virtual resources but not instructions for various forms of on-line adaptations, which can include online breakout groups, white boards, multi-media content, and other ways to shape virtual engagement and learning.

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