Hello ,

We hope you’re doing well and having a cozy start to the fall season. Last month, after more than a year of work, we launched the Ayni School (yay!) with both the Social Movements course and the Seeds course as our two inaugural self-paced courses.

Since then we have added functionality for those who want to pay their enrollments in installments of 3 months or 6 months. We have also made the first module for the Seeds Course and the Social Movements Course available to view.

Furthermore, with the new year approaching soon, many of us are in the process of coming together and preparing for organizational and team retreats that will shape the strategic direction of our work for the coming year. We at Ayni, after many years of coaching organizations, can’t stop reiterating how important it is to take the time to retreat and step back from our everyday work.  

We believe that our Social Movements Course can support your retreat process and provide some useful frameworks to facilitate your strategic thinking during or in preparation for your retreat.

In this email, we want to cover, in broad strokes, the four key frameworks that you will encounter in the course that may be of some interest to you.

The first module, which you can access right now, is titled the Movement Breakthrough. This module discusses the tensions that arise, the questions we ponder, and the scope of leadership that we assume as individuals, as organizations, and in our roles within the movements that we’re a part of. This of course is a constant and ongoing conversation that we should revisit time and again within our retreats as we build alignment across members of our team/staff. 

This module also introduces the importance of separating tools and frameworks that we use to comprehend intra-organizational dynamics/strategy from those that apply to movements (across many organizations and individuals) so we can start to reorient towards a movement perspective. Within our retreats we have to be clear to not collapse or reduce how we understand our scope of work as organizations from the scope of movements.

The second module, titled the Social View of Power can support your retreat process through building alignment across your team on the strategic advantages that arise from viewing power through a social view lens. Often, in our organizations and in our campaigns, we get stuck on just targeting electoral officials (viewing power in a monolithic frame) or use tactics that leave our communal power on the table.

What if instead we unlocked new possibilities that can arise from having a social view?

The third module on Foundational Theories of Change can support your retreat team in identifying your organization’s role and purpose within your movement. Often we are unsure how our work and the work of others serves and fits the larger movement. This module introduces 5 theories of change that alongside later modules, you can use to map the movement ecology that you are a part of. This of course is done with the purpose of building more alignment in your work, potentially shifting how you approach your yearly objectives, and giving you language to distinguish (and more importantly for relating to) other key actors, stakeholders, and organizations within your movement.

Our module titled A Season for Everything delves into how at different scales, both as individuals and organizations, we move through ebbs and flows that mark distinct periods, or seasons, of our work and strategy. These periods mark both the boundaries and opportunities to start new projects and ventures, to grow and collaborate, to harvest a season of good work, and internalize what you have learned along the way. In other words, this module is about learning to do the right things at the right time.

We all surely have experienced the pain of being in a winter, meaning a time of internal reflection and low capacity, and being placed into a position of intense work that doesn’t allow the time needed for rest and reflection. This in turn creates the impact of stress and burnout. Therefore this module is about building clarity, which of course is best accomplished when we retreat, so we can parse out what season we’re in and not miss the opportunity of creating effective strategies that align with our seasons. 

Lastly, alongside A Season for Everything, the module on Movement Seasons supports us developing a stronger attunement to where your movement is at the current moment.

So there you have it. Here are four key frameworks that cover just 4 of the 11 modules in the Social Movements course. We hope that you enroll in the course and integrate these frameworks in preparation for and during your upcoming retreats. 

In Reciprocity,

Carlos, Fhatima, Sergio, and Rodrigo