(late rate kicks in after this Friday Feb 28th).
Every story of social change (good and bad) has at its inception a story of people connecting in-person to share, bond and plan. The annual Campaigning Forum (ECF) event is designed specifically for this. Our opponents are organising. You need to show up to be part of what comes next.
A true community event is rare
Most events that call themselves "community events" are simply
designed to be training and product promotion events. You can see the
difference in the agenda: true community events have mostly empty agenda
slots for participants to fill. Non-community events pre-select all the
agenda time-slots based on the organisers' goals.
Don't be confused that ECF events are for training - they never were and never are. Yes, you learn a ton of new ideas and approaches. But this is a by-product of what ECF really is: a campaigning community event: it is designed to build life-long connections and confidence to learn how to learn together. That is key for us working together over our careers to make deep sustained change.
I've incorporated your input...
The big picture is that current events are leaving us all anxious and feeling helpless. This is by design. So this year I've designed the ECF event to:
- Renew your hope and resilience
- Boost your confidence that something can be done and you can do it
- Learn from stories of successes and failure from each other
- Explore how to counter disinformation and extremism
- Retrain our minds to have a proactive response to changes
- Reconsider what our role is in shaping the next decades
- Build deep connections to expand your allies and peers to make the above continuous
Latest event updates
- As always, you can see who is else is coming so far. 23 people have confirmed and another few dozen are in the process of getting approval and applying - See the list at https://fairsay.com/campaigning-forum-2025/#participants
- Sarah P Corbett - known for her "Gentle Protest" approaches is the lead speaker on day 1. Sarah's approach works particularly well in a high polarisation and hich anxiety environment we are in - and so it is super important more of us consider a range of approaches to organising supporters and influencing decision makers.
So I really look forward to seeing you and your colleagues and peers at the event this year. It feels to me that if ever there was a time to show up - it is this year!
(late rate kicks in after this Friday Feb 28th - extensions can be granted - just ask).
Cheers,
Duane
