This toolkit is not meant to be read as a book. Although you can work through this toolkit from start to finish, many sections can stand alone and will also respond to a particular need, context and/or moment that the weaver is on, or in which the weaving process itself is taking place. The toolkit operates through tools for reflection and tools for action that can respond to these moments/contexts. You can refer back to the table of contents to jump to the topics, case studies and examples that best suit your current needs and organizing moment. You can also take what feels useful to you from this toolkit in any particular moment and ignore the rest. You know your organizing context best and you’ll know if something is or is not applicable to your local environment.
As was mentioned before, the toolkit is divided into two broad sections: tools that enable the weaver to reflect on the state of weaving and tools that enable particular actions for the weaver to use. These tools can be describe in the following way:
Tools for reflection: questions based on a dialogical model that the weavers develop rooted on the practice of other weavers. They indicate what tools for actions you would take in the advancement of the weaving process. Tools for reflections can inform tools for actions. These tools include:
Emergence/Germinating (This phase is about the alternatives getting to know each other and where they come from and are going so that they can see the possibilities for forming a weaver)
Building/Growing Activities –inward and outward facing (This phase is about bringing alternatives together to establish the weaver in practice).
Rooting/preservation (This phase is about creating stable foundations and establishing the values and politics of an intentional weaving process);
Operationalizing (This phase is about reflecting the functionality to establish the weaver in practice).
Tools for action: Enables rather than prescribing the weaver to do something that it would not normally do. Tools for action include:
Documentation (what alternatives are already doing to have a better sense of commonalities, and their diverse ways of responding to the multiple crises).
Encounters/Gatherings/Entanglements (Spaces to dialogue and to understand collectively through a grounded, interconnected and comprehensive analyses of the multiple crises and to imagine alternatives futures – this may be in person (ideal) or online.
Aside from the tools for reflection/action, the way that information is organized throughout the kit also relies on actual examples carried out by the GTA weavers. These examples are meant to illustrate some of the ways that reflection/action are useful in different contexts and how each weaver responded to particular challenges, situations and contexts. The use of examples is meant to illustrate and inspire ideas and hence they are not meant to be ‘copy-pasted’ to your own context. Since you know more than anyone the specific characteristics of the context in which you are weaving. These examples can help bring in new ideas, practices or strategies.
If you are reading this, you are most likely already engaging in organizing strategies in your own region. Maybe the term weaving and the practices that it entails is new to you, but putting the concepts aside for a second, we invite you to think deeply about the ways that you are already using many of these theories and practices in your own organizing. From there, this toolkit will help you figure out what you might want to do next and how you can do it. For example, if you are in an early stage of weaving, the tools for reflection can help you think: How can you collectively define alternatives? What interconnections do you see between diverse alternatives?; How is your vision of radical transformations informed by what you are struggling against? If on the other hand, you have a set of alternatives already involved in a weaving process, other tools for action could be useful to think about what type of encounters/gatherings can be most useful in a particular context (i.e. such as thematic encounters, assemblies, community exchanges, etc.).