Title reads "Power Training and Planning Tools'. The word Power is in cut out letters in different colours.

Power: Training and Planning Tools

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Introduction


Training resources for changemakers including workshop exercises, activities and templates to explore in a group setting more about power, including:

  • different forms of power
  • patterns of power
  • power mapping and analysis

Other useful tools for trainers related to power include:

Training Resources

Exercises and Activities

Understanding “Power Over”: An Introduction to Power Analysis, WeRise Toolkit, JASS Just Associates
Overview: This activity explores different forms of power – formal (visible), shadow (hidden) and invisible power – and how they are exercised to gain and maintain power over others. Participants gain insight into the complexities of power and the need for a range of strategies to successfully respond to “power over.” This activity creates the framework for Power Analysis for Strategy.
Time: 1 – 2.5 hours

Visible and Hidden Power, Feminist Basket of Resources, Oxfam, see pgs 93-94
Purpose: Explore and unpack how visible, hidden and invisible power operates around an issue that a group has been organising around.
Time: 1 hour

Sources of Transforming Power Overview, Just Associates
This activity explores participants’ sources of personal and shared sources of power and introduces a JASS framework of inclusive and transformative forms of power (power to, within, with and for) as distinct from power over.
Purpose: We use this activity to help participants recognize and name our own sources of personal and collective power as activists, facilitators and organizers. Using brainstorming, living statues and discussion we enrich our understanding of our experiences and analyze sources of power with a JASS framework that names 4 kinds of transformative power.
Time: 50 – 60 minutes

Patterns of Power, WeRise Toolkit, JASS Just Associates
Overview: This activity engages a group in acting out familiar power dynamics in different aspects of life to better “see” them and to explore what changes would make them equitable and just.
Purpose: Power dynamics are part of all parts of our lives and even inequitable ones can seem normal or natural because they are so familiar. This activity helps make power “visible” so we can better understand how it works. By playing various dynamics out, participants can see them more clearly and examine the impact on their lives, voices and leadership. The second stage of the activity invites participants to imagine how those relationships could change and become more equitable and just. This can also feed into a visioning exercise about the changed future we work toward.
Time: 90 minutes – 2 hours

Exploring Power with Chapati Power Diagrams Activity, Leaderful Organizing
This 1.5h session will support participants to develop shared understanding and vocabulary related to power in groups and to develop the capacity to talk about power in our groups. The chapati diagrams are a way of analyzing power in a specific situation. The activity requires an ‘experiential’ element that can be analyzed. This could be generated using a game with the group. It could also simply draw on the dynamics that have arisen within a group conversation or in the actual functioning of a team or group in their ‘real life’ outside of the session.
Time: 1.20 mins – 1.40 mins

Power Analysis for Strategy Overview, We Rise
This activity builds on the power analysis introduced in Understanding Power Over to enable a group to apply the power framework to specific organizing issues in their context both to understand the dynamics of power over they are up against and think through strategies for change.
Purpose: Applying the Power Framework to our specific contexts and organizing efforts, we can deepen our analysis of the complexities of power we will need to navigate. It will help us identify the different forms of power at play – from formal power in decision making arenas to less visible but equally important forms of power – shadow forces and invisible power. And it will move towards developing targeted and well-informed strategies that both challenge power over and enable us to build transformative power.
Time: 1.5 – 2 hours

Pillars of Support Tool, SNAP Guide: Synergizing Nonviolent Action and Peacebuilding,  The Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace, Nadine Bloch and Lisa Schirch, pgs 94 – 97
Identify the opponents’ sources of power and structures of support. There are two versions of this exercise. A simple, interactive theater version requires a chair or table or other object that can be lifted by four or five people. A more detailed version of this exercise can be done on paper, requiring large sheets of paper and markers.

Power Assessment Activities, Activities to Deepen Your Power-Building Analysis, Human Impact Partners, see pgs 7-12
Activity #1: How powerful are you?
The purpose of this activity is to get your team primed to consider how powerful they are as individuals and as a group (team/office/agency/organization/coalition) working to catalyze systems change.
Activity #2: Identifying your powers
Get explicit with your team about the kinds of power you hold as an office/agency/ organization/coalition. 

Power Paper Activity, Sustaining the Climate Justice Movement: Psychosocial Resilience and Regenerative Activism Training Manual, Ulex Project and Transformative Education CIC ,see pgs 240 – 241
Introducing the idea of diverse ways of holding/responding to power by approaching a (potentially) tricky subject with element of play/fun.
Time: 10-15 minutes

Upside-Down Triangle: Understanding the Consent Theory of Power, Training for Change
To introduce an alternative power structure model, the upside down triangle.

Chair Power: Three types of Power, Training for Change
Goals are to:

  • give participants a theoretical tool to analyze power;
  • assist participants in using power-with-others and power-from-within.

Time: 30-45 minutes

Exploring Privilege and Rank, Transversal Organizing and the Ecology of Social Movements, Module 5: Working with power and inequalities across our movements
Purpose: Building awareness around privilege and power dynamics in groups, becoming more aware of power and privilege individuals hold in groups and considering ways of navigating this well
Time: 90-120 mins

Power and Powerlessness, WeRise Toolkit, Just Associates JASS
Overview: This activity is designed to begin a discussion of power by exploring people’s experiences of power and powerlessness. It serves as an introduction to “power over”, or oppressive power, and the sources of our own power to transform our lives and make change.
Purpose: In order to create change, we need to understand the power we are up against and how it affects us in different ways, and begin exploring how we also have power. This activity helps participants examine how they have experienced different manifestations of power and powerlessness in their lives. From this foundation, the activity builds an understanding of both power over and the capacities and sources of power we can cultivate to make change.
Time: 1 hour

Power Walk, Activity 1, Feminist Basket of Resources, Oxfam, see pgs 85-88
Purpose: Allow participants to “walk” in someone else’s shoes and experience what it feels like to be powerless or powerful based on gender, race, ethnicity, occupation, education level, disability, age, health etc. and in the face of different obstacles or shocks. Participants thus become more aware of the power dynamics within and between communities and our organizations and to ensure those lacking power are supported to rise up. 
Time: 1-2 hours

Power and Patriarchy, Activity 2: The Master’s House “Power & Patriarchy”, Feminist Basket of Resources, Oxfam, see pgs 89-90
An entry-level activity designed to help participants to think about and understand patriarchy and the various systems of oppression by visually constructing them in a “Master’s House”. Purpose: Understand and analyse how invisible power dynamics and narratives play a significant role in shaping our ideas and beliefs around some areas of our lives, such as patriarchy.
Time: 3 hours, however you can stretch this into a full day exercise depending on the depth of analysis you want to embark on.

The Power Flower, Feminist Basket of Resources, Oxfam, see pgs 46-47
The Power Flower is a tool to look at societal power dynamics and our intersecting identities. Every person has multiple, nuanced identities that form our lives. Just as our identities are complicated, so are those of the partners and friends we work with: gender, race, ethnicity, age, education, among others intersect and interact to shape who we are and what challenges and contradictions we confront This intersectionality shapes our potential for exercising power and becoming dynamic, collaborative and transformative facilitators, organisers and leaders. This exercise should allow for everyone to appreciate the power that they have and how this may make it uncomfortable for other group to participate.
Time: 2 hours

Stakeholder Analysis, Organisational Strategy, Org Builders Toolkit, NEON, see pgs 43-45
This exercise will help you conduct a stakeholder analysis in a practical way, which will enable conversations about building alliances, identifying types of power, and discussing ideas to change thinking and to lever change. This exercise is best conducted with a team of people with different perspectives on stakeholders but the same overall goal. (for example, a cross-organisational team). You will need a flip chart, whiteboard or large sheet of paper, marker pens and post-it notes.

Forces for Change, Organisational Strategy, Org Builders Toolkit, NEON, see pgs 58-60
This is a tool for analysing the forces that shape our world right now and for thinking about the kind of power you need to build to achieve the changes you seek. It’s useful for opening up conversations about power and change.
Time: 2-4 hours

Points of Intervention, Beautiful Trouble
Points of intervention are specific places in a system where a targeted action can effectively interrupt the functioning and power of a system and open the way to change. By understanding these different points, organizers can develop a strategy that identifies the best places to intervene in order to have the greatest impact. Prepare six flip charts, one for each Point of Intervention, and hang them around the training space with room in between each chart. Add the name of the Point of Intervention at the top of each chart…

Power Mapping, Beautiful Trouble
Map the power dynamics at play to identify your primary target using the Power Mapping: Axes diagram.

Templates and Worksheets

Videos

Pillars of Power

The Pillars of Power is a power analysis tool used to identify the institutions and individuals that support the issues you are working to undermine. It can be used to identify where to target your efforts to make the foundations of an oppressive structure or system fail. This video has been developed using content from Beautiful Trouble’s Toolbox, an interconnected web of the key strategies and tactics that have inspired people-powered victories & upended the status quo.

Understanding Pillars of Support

Learn more about the pillars of support in this short explainer video from The Horizons Project.

What do the decision makers care about?

How can we build and leverage power so a decision maker is compelled to make the change we are campaigning for? This video is by Friends of the Earth UK.

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  • Organisation: Commons Library
  • Location: Australia
  • Release Date: 2025

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