Activate Labs globally supports nonviolent social movements through training, facilitation, graphic services, digital and technological access and mobilization innovative workshops, and participatory media, creating a more inclusive, just and peaceful world.
Co-design: People-Powered Design™ and Peace Design™
Design thinking without a practice of embedding transformational principles, community, and creative empathy can be extractive while perpetuating oppressive human behaviors and unjust systems that can stunt social innovation. People-Powered Design™ centers the margins, develops affirmative agency, liberates creativity, and shifts power. People-Powered Design™ is a process used by frontline communities and organizations to co-design, plan, and co-create interventions for peacebuilding, human rights, gender justice, international development, and social impact.
Our experiential and participatory labs include four modules – Perspective, Purpose, Plan, and Power. Workshops usually have 20-30 participants and run between 3-5 days. Whether it is to create a campaign, transform conflict, co-design a strategic plan, team building, or get unstuck.
Cultural Organizing and movement building
Since 2017, we have organized and curated hundreds of events and actions where we take up public, often political, space for peace to memorialize, build power, and shift culture. To date, our activations have engaged thousands of communities through art, music, theater, dance, and more. Based on the People-Powered Design pedagogy, we have led activations to support inclusive and peacebuilding policies, which include artistic design, logistical organizing, and outreach to key constituents and stakeholders. We would love to connect with you on how we can help lead a peace activation for your issue or policy.
Participatory and Experiential Training Facilitation
Participatory Media is a methodology with a series of tools that provides any community members with enough technical skills to plan, film, edit and screen a video or photographic gallery on their own. We use participatory video and photography to shift power. With Participatory Media, frontline communities and those impacted by violence or injustice tell their own stories in a holistic and transformational way. In many ways the camera is a tool to spark up dialogue, reflection and build power for those directly impacted by today’s most pressing issues like gender justice, climate change, identity based violence, refugee crisis and many more. The ideal participatory media process involves trainees belonging to a group or community who have the commitment and willingness to pursue a change based on their communities’ needs and not only their own. Even though the product (final video or photography series) is important, participatory media is more about the process than the product. However the final product is a powerful way to increase knowledge, shift attitudes and change behavior towards peace, justice and transformation.