Every person has power. But only if you know about your own strength and skills, you can use them and work effectively for social change. The aim is not to get power over other people, but to develop your own power to act.
This approach, to become aware of your own strength, is called „Social Empowerment“. The aim is to empower people to become active for their own interests. It does not matter whether this is done in your personal life or through political activity within society. What is important is to recognise ways to act, alone or within a group, and to start to act, instead of giving away the responsibility for changing a situation to others.
People’s Power for social change develops when many people organise themselves in groups, and all together build a social movement.
Many groups which are working in social movements are familiar with the problem of being overwhelmed by political events and therefore only reacting to them. This way of working very often means only stuffing holes where injustice, destruction and unreasonable conditions are most obvious. For your work and engagement not only to be more than a botched-up job on society, it is necessary to search for the reasons and roots of the problems and to develop your own strategies for action.
I therefore think it is very important to develop and to share techniques and methods, which enable people to analyse links between and causes of society’s problems.
From 1998 until 2001, I also took part in an international Training for Trainers in Nonviolent Conflict Transformation at Kurve Wustrow in Germany.
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We live in a violent world. We suffer the social and environmental consequences of a capitalist economic system based in irresponsible growth. We suffer the "Ley Mordaza" (a Spanish law increasing repression of protest) and the reform of the Penal Code, the brutal politics related to "foreigners" and borders, the repressive police response to social protests... These forms of violence, within the framework of a society which in addition is hetero-patriarchal and in an open systemic crisis, makes us desire change in the direction of a nonviolent transition.
Every Tuesday of January, beginning on 12 January, and also during the workshop on Saturday, 30 January, we put the focus on the violence the system exercises and on the different nonviolent alternatives that exist as a protest or action against inequality and social injustice.
It's 15 May 2003, Tel Aviv, Israel: a military wedding, groom, bride, and the rabbi in uniform, as are the guests. The pair march up to the rabbi, get married, and then march out, followed by their marching guests. Fast forward: the pair march through the streets, the uniformed pregnant wife gives birth to a baby dressed in uniform, while the uniformed husband stands next to her, saluting.
In Sevilla, all trainings can also be arranged in Puma.
Below you find some tools available on this website. This is work in progress, so feel free to send some comments or even new tools. I do not claim to have developed all of these tools myself. Sharing of training tools is an important part of nonviolence (training), and wherever possible I have given sources. Apologies if I have missed some - just get in touch, and I add the omitted source(s).