Seedling Series: Social Movement Ecology

We tend to approach change one organisation, project, or intervention at a time. Yet significant social change is never produced by a single actor. It emerges from the interaction of many organisations, campaigns, and communities working within and across multiple issues, often without ever coordinating directly.

When this field is healthy, small efforts compound into real power. When it is fragmented, even brilliant individual work snaps back to the status quo. In a political moment defined by polarisation and the deliberate stoking of division, this fragmentation is both inefficient and dangerous.

Movement ecology starts where you are: in the specific place and field of organisations you are already part of. It is a way of seeing that field as a single complex adaptive system, with its own feedback loops, stable states it keeps returning to, and resistance to top-down control. Drawing on complexity science, political theory, and the practical experience of the Movement Ecology Collective, this session explores why systems snap back, what separates a healthy ecology from a merely busy one, and how a diversity of strategies can add up to collective power rather than noise.

You will then apply the lens directly to your own context, locating your work within its wider ecology, identifying where your efforts can make the most difference and improve the health of your ecology.

Whether you work on a place-based project, inside a campaign, organisation, or support others to create change as a facilitator, consultant, or funder, you will leave with a sharper picture of the field you operate in and a clearer sense of where the highest-leverage work actually sits.

This short course is offered in collaboration between the Movement Ecology Collective and School of System Change as part of the Seedling Series: short courses supporting changemakers to embrace complexity through discovering the diversity of systemic approaches and practitioners.