During the GTA’s first in-person Assembly in Kenya in 2022, several GTA members asked the facilitation team key questions about how alternatives are identified (i.e., what constitutes an “alternative”), how the weavers have brought these alternatives together, and what processes the weavers follow to maintain interaction while avoiding hierarchical or top-down structures typical of traditional NGO organization. In response to this mandate, a group of GTA members—including weavers, endorsers, and representatives of alternative movements—formed a working group to develop a toolkit for weaving. Additionally, members from three weaver organizations (Vikalp Sangam, Crianza Mutua Mexico, and MASSA) and members of the GTA facilitation team met in Indonesia during the 5th MASSA gathering (25th-29th October, 2024) to discuss and create a prototype for this toolkit. This document aims to present key aspects of the weaving toolkit to establish the political groundwork from which we approach this process.
The world faces an interwoven set of crises rooted in oppressive systems that divide humanity and separate people from nature. These crises are not isolated symptoms but the result of deep-seated structures of class, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, state domination, and human-centric ideologies. Historical processes of authoritarian, imperialist, and fascist dominance have displaced diverse ways of knowing and living, rendering entire societies disposable. Today, the military-industrial complex and capitalist forces exacerbate conflicts, and ecological crises like biodiversity loss and climate change bring the planet close to a human-driven sixth mass extinction, threatening billions of lives. Conventional development models, focused on unchecked economic growth, perpetuate unsustainable consumption and arbitrary classifications of societies, while proposed solutions—like carbon trading and geoengineering—address symptoms but ignore root causes. To counter these intertwined crises, we must seek holistic, intersectional, and truly transformative alternatives.
In response to these crises, a powerful wave of grassroots movements is emerging, striving for a future that is pluralistic, democratic, decolonized, just, egalitarian, liberated, feminist, ecologically mindful, peaceful, post-capitalist, biocultural, prosperous, and rooted in solidarity and radical love. These movements, diverse in their interpretations and practices, collectively uphold a core of shared values. Indigenous communities, grassroots collectives, and individuals are cultivating sustainable and equitable ways of living through practices like agroecology, community health, alternative education, gender and sexual justice, radical democracy, local economies centered on care and reciprocity, worker-owned production, and the conservation of nature and cultural diversity. Many of these initiatives draw from ancient Indigenous traditions, while others emerge as counter-movements within industrial societies. Though currently too small or fragmented to drive large-scale transformation, these efforts represent a crucial foundation for holistic change.
The GTA defines "alternatives" as grassroots movements and initiatives that challenge and replace the dominant system responsible for inequality, exploitation, and unsustainability. Specifically, the GTA emphasizes "radical or transformative alternatives" — efforts that aim to break from dominant structures and pursue political and economic democracy, local self-reliance, social justice, cultural diversity, and ecological resilience. These initiatives prioritize autonomy from both the State and capitalist economy, working to dismantle hierarchies and uphold principles of sufficiency, non-violence, justice, solidarity, and care for life and the Earth. Although some connection to capitalist markets and the State may exist, these movements strive to minimize such dependencies to maintain their independence and holistic approach to life.
Weaving refers to the act of connecting multiple alternatives on different themes/spheres, in an inter-sectorial way. Weaving is rooted on a series of common criteria – a) breaking with patriarchy, racism, casteism, classism; b) breaking with the hegemony of the nation-state and the system of liberal democracy, c) breaking with the capitalist system and d) breaking with the culture of anthropocentrism – creating the basis for common networks of alternatives to capitalism based on cooperation and solidarity. The challenge is to conceptualize spaces and platforms for which these alternatives converge and come into dialogues with one another, to build and establish effective interaction channels for pedagogical, political support, knowledge and/or experience sharing, as well as organizing broader coalitions and defense systems and strategies.
A toolkit is understood as a set of tools designed to be used together and/or for a particular purpose. The need for this toolkit emerged from GTA’s first physical assembly in Kenya (2023). This toolkit presents some of the key ways, both in praxis and theory of existing GTA weavers Vikalp Sangam, Crianza Mutua Mexico, MASSA and Crianzas Mutuas Colombia have put together different actions to build regional networks between alternatives as they face common struggles and enable a plurality of responses to these crises. This toolkit presentes a series exercises, actions, examples and questions that can help a potential or already established weaver to build, maintain and preserve a woven network reflecting on key takeaways, lessons learned, past failures and case studies to inspire and support weaving across different regions. The GTA’s toolkit for weaving was built by weaving practitioners involved in different weaving processes and the construction of alternatives. We have also drawn on a series of concepts, theories and practices that have informed this toolkit, but ultimately this toolkit is inspired by our own practice. This toolkit is the result of friendship, solidarity and camaraderie, and hence we hope that it will not be reduced to a means to an end but that it will also be an end to a mean by creating a convivial process that might lead to a woven fabric of solidarity, friendship and hope.