The Growers Guild

Facilitating Relationships, Learning, and Resource Sharing

Training, education, and convening spaces for learning and planning together are instrumental for building strategic, sustainable, and inclusive movements. The Horizons Project works with partner organizations to support trainers, facilitators, and coaches as they hone their craft in service of organizers, bridgebuilders, and activists working to strengthen our democracy and counter anti-democratic norms and behaviors.

The Growers’ Guild

The Growers’ Guild brings together a cohort of cross-disciplinary trainers, facilitators, and coaches who work within the bridgebuilding, social justice, and democracy spaces on an ongoing basis to:

• Co-create a learning community focused on honing craft and building collective muscle for analyzing context and thinking through trade-offs, gaps, and strengths of respective approaches to social change.
• Explore how practitioner training and convenings can be more creatively envisioned to weave together a broad-based pro-democracy movement and counter the rising authoritarian threats.
• Curate and develop interdisciplinary tools and resources that will help activists, bridgebuilders, and organizers build strong relationships and power in a way that centers common humanity, belonging, and resilience.
• Serve as a platform to offer contextualized coaching, training, and strategic planningsupport to local, state, and national groups and organizations that are working to strengthen our democracy and counter the rising authoritarian threat.

Background

Horizons hosted a panel of trainers, facilitators, and organizers that work in different methodologies across the movement space. The aim was to discuss how people who fill “cross-network roles” (like movement trainers, facilitators, and coaches) can help activists, organizers, and bridgebuilders do some of this sensemaking. One of the main takeaways from this event was that trainers could benefit from ongoing conversations about how different methodologies, approaches, and curricula can reinforce one another to address key challenges and opportunities they are seeing across the social justice, democracy, and bridgebuilding spaces. Another recommendation was that diverse movement-focused organizations and networks press funders to increase and sustain their investments in training and coaching as a core element of supporting broad-based pro-democracy movement.

After the discussion, the Horizons team held more than 80 scoping conversations with key US-based training organizations to better understand the training landscape and explore what future conversations amongst these groups are needed, as well as who might be interested and available to participate. This resulting Growers’ Guild initiative brings together 16 trainers, facilitators, and coaches from the larger ecosystem of social change (including nonviolent action and social justice, leadership and organizing, bridge building and peacebuilding, and pro-democracy/anti-authoritarianism organizing).

In addition to the core group of Growers’ Guild members, Horizons is committed to sharing key insights and potential tools the Guild may develop with a larger network of friends/organizations interested in these reflections/resources. We are also exploring how to more meaningfully engage this larger network.