A Practitioner’s Guide for Accompanying Nonviolent Social Movements
About the guide
Narrative Weaving Across Difference: A Practitioner’s Guide for Accompanying Nonviolent Social Movements is now available. Grounded in African practice, shaped by movement actors, and offered to movements, this guide was developed by a Narrative Working Group across four African countries within the African Coaching Network (ACN). It grew out of two years of learning by doing, using ACN’s experiential movement support pedagogy.
The guide is a living tapestry of real stories, hard-won experiments, and deep reflections from facilitators and activists. It treats narrative not only as messaging or communication, but as lived experience and an organizing strategy that can hold difference, invite action, and nurture nonviolent movements. It is adaptive, experiential, and centered on wellbeing and care, especially in contexts where dominant stories can feel like undeniable truth.
It is written for facilitators, organizers, and narrative practitioners who accompany movements and social justice networks, featuring seven modules that can be used in different order and adapted to context as is appropriate. Each module includes a core question, learning objectives, a step-by-step session flow of activities, expected outcomes, key considerations and bonus real cases that you can choose to associate with drawn from our pilot work. Practitioners are invited to pick, choose, and re-root the ideas in their own realities as they weave narratives of dignity, justice, and collective power.
A French and Arabic version will be available shortly. You can always reach out to us at movements@africancoachingnetwork.org
Learn more about ACN
We are a practice guild with a Pan African agenda, a community of embedded practitioners who accompany movements to sharpen strategy, deepen resilience, and strengthen nonviolent power across Africa. We are currently spread across 13 countries in the continent weaving our work through the relational infrastructure built over a decade.
We centre strategic nonviolence as a disciplined craft, a proven methodology (according to many studies produced at various institutes like the ICNC) for achieving political change. This evidence shows that organised, diverse, and disciplined nonviolent movements are among the most effective pathways to lasting transformation.
You can always reach out to us at movements@africancoachingnetwork.org
