Careful, We’re Organizing
aka How to Fight without Falling Apart
Course Description
Movements are built through relationships. Yet the pressures of organizing (urgency, conflict, exhaustion, political disagreement, and unequal power) can strain those relationships and undermine our collective capacity. How can we build movements that are both effective in challenging injustice and caring in how we work together?
This course is an invitation to practice and explore care, conflict, accountability and collective sustainability in movement work. Rather than treating care as an individual practice of “self-care,” we will look at how our organizations and movements can create cultures and structures that enable people to participate, grow, disagree, repair harm, and sustain struggle over the long term. We will also consider care in relation to the wider communities and ecosystems on which our movements depend.
The course is intended for activists, organizers, labour and community movement builders, and others involved in collective political work, particularly those interested in strengthening the relationships, cultures and practices that make movements more sustainable and transformative.
Through short inputs, discussion, practical exercises, reflection and peer learning, participants will explore questions such as:
- How can we understand and work with conflict rather than simply avoid it?
- How do power and inequality shape conflict within movements?
- What does meaningful accountability and repair look like?
- How can we move beyond individual “self-care” towards collective care?
- How can movements address burnout, urgency and unequal workloads structurally?
- What would it mean to build movements that care for people, communities and the planet while still being capable of taking bold action?
The course aims not only to provide concepts and practical tools, but to create a space to experiment with different ways of being in movement together. Participants will leave with practices they can apply in their own organizing, a shared repository of resources and movement knowledge, and a clearer vision of what caring and sustainable movement-building can look like.
This is a practice-based course so we invite participants to come willing to share and practice along with others.
- Class Starts on October 21, 2026
- Class Length: 1.5 hour Per Session
- Session Schedule: 6 Online Weekly Sessions
- Course Fee: USD$60 (Regular Price) / USD$40 (Students/Workers/Unemployed)
- If you are in financial difficulties and would like to apply for a fee waiver, please email us at convenor@labourschool.org, and a decision will be made by the course facilitator.
- Class Size: Class Limited to 10 Students (*first come first serve)
Registration Ends October 20, 2026
Course Starts on October 21, 2026
Course Facilitator
Nash Tysmans is a writer and organizer from the Philippines and currently residing in Brussels. She works as a regional organizer for workers in the informal economy and cares deeply about sustaining movements.
Class Time (Timezones in Asia)
- 4:00pm: Pakistan
- 4:30pm: India/Sri Lanka
- 4:45pm: Nepal
- 5:00pm: Bangladesh
- 5:30pm: Myanmar
- 6:00pm: Indonesia/Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam
- 7:00pm: Hong Kong/Taiwan/China/Philippines/Singapore/Malaysia
- 8:00pm: Japan/Korea
Class Project
Potentially building a repository of care and movement building resources
Weekly Class Schedule
Session 1 (Oct 21, 2026): What does care have to do with organizing?
In this first session, we will explore what kind of movement culture we create through the way we organize. We discuss forms of care beyond self-care and look at the tension between urgency and sustainability.
Session 2 (Oct 28, 2026): Conflict is not a problem
In this session we discover what conflict tells us about our organizations and how we organize. We also examine how we can better work with conflicts rather than eliminate them altogether.
Session 3 (Nov 4, 2026): The difficult conversation
It’s inevitable. We will have to relate with each other but what skills do we need to have to stay in relationship with one another, especially when something is difficult?
Session 4 (Nov 11, 2026): Accountability, harm, and repair
This session looks at the reality of harm and how movements can take this seriously without reproducing punitive and exclusionary tools.
Session 5 (Nov 18, 2026): From self-care to collective capacity
This session explores how we can change the conditions that produce burnout instead of encouraging activists to cope better.
Session 6 (Nov 25, 2026): What would a caring movement look like?
In the final session, we synthesize the lessons we’ve learned throughout the course and co-develop a practice-based guide to how we want to infuse care into our work.
To contact us: convenor@labourschool.org
