SECTOR: Community Organizing, Community Development & Social Change
LEAD ORGANIZATION: CIVIC SQUARE Birmingham
PARTNERS: Healing Justice London | Centre for Alternative Technology | Doughnut Economics Action Lab | Dark Matter Labs | Material Cultures | Fircroft College of Adult Education
REACH: 200 movement builders, organizers, and practitioners working toward regenerative futures across the UK and EU.
THE CHALLENGE
When Technical Skills Aren’t Enough: The Hidden Crisis in Movement Building
After a decade of building civic infrastructure and running transformational learning journeys, CIVIC SQUARE witnessed a troubling pattern: Organizations were developing increasingly sophisticated technical skills in economics, ecology, retrofit, and materials, yet they were fragmenting under the weight of trauma, conflict, and burnout. Interpersonal crises persisted regardless of organizational budget or stability. “Whether we had zero pounds or we had full salaries, the problems have been the same,” reflected Imandeep Kaur, CIVIC SQUARE’s Co-Founder and Director.
Organizations that had spent 10-15 years building movements found themselves torn apart not by lack of vision or strategy, but by unaddressed trauma responses, defensive patterns, and the inability to navigate conflict while maintaining collective momentum. Meanwhile, the urgency of the moment (housing crises, climate collapse, rising authoritarianism) created impossible pressure. Leaders felt compelled to rush forward even as their capacity eroded, trapped in what Kaur described as a “chaotic capacity cycle” where “you’re drowning and you can’t get up to take a breath.”
CIVIC SQUARE recognized that building regenerative futures at the neighborhood scale required more than technical expertise. Their alumni from four major learning journeys (Reimagining Economics/Neighborhood Doughnut, Ecological Health in Neighbourhoods, Material Matters/Retrofit Reimagined/Neighborhood Trade School, and Re:Builders) had developed impressive knowledge in doughnut economics, retrofit, and material systems. But, as Stephanie Brobbey, founder and CEO of the Good Ancestor Movement remarked, the “hidden wiring” was missing: The embodied capacities to sustain collaborative work under pressure, navigate difference without fracturing, and maintain the energy needed for long-term transformation.
Working in Birmingham neighborhoods marked by historical trauma and systemic neglect, CIVIC SQUARE understood that propositional work—building alternatives rather than just opposing current systems—demanded practitioners who could hold complexity, work across differences, and remain resourced enough to keep going. As the political landscape grew more hostile in early 2025, the need became urgent: How could they gather their ecosystem not just to share technical skills, but to build the collective resilience needed to “meet the moment” and create lasting change?
THE APPROACH
Re:Assemble: Weaving Embodied Practice Into Movement Building
During the weekend of June 6-9, 2025, CIVIC SQUARE convened Re:Assemble at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales, which is a repurposed quarry transformed into a living laboratory for sustainable futures. The gathering brought together approximately 200 participants, primarily alumni from CIVIC SQUARE’s four learning journeys mentioned above, plus local residents and invited collaborators from across the UK, EU, and US.
The setting itself embodied the gathering’s ethos: A space of radical transformation, where extractive industry had given way to regenerative possibility. Participants gathered knowing, as Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs framed it, that humanity faces only two options: “mutually assured destruction or mutually assured thriving.” The weekend would be about choosing the latter—together.
Unlike traditional conferences, Re:Assemble was intentionally co-created, offering 26 concurrent sessions that ranged from technical workshops on neighborhood retrofit and doughnut economics to clay workshops, singing circles, and Palestine solidarity events. The space was “relaxed and informal” yet held an “active posture,” ready to do the deep work needed.
CIVIC SQUARE invited Healing Justice London (HJL) to curate an entire strand of programming focused on embodied capacity building and central. Through this collaborative partnership, Healing Justice London invited Lumos founder Nkem Ndefo to lead sessions introducing the Resilience Toolkit framework to build the individual and collective capacities needed for liberatory work.
The core workshops included:
Embodied Individual Capacities for Collective Liberation: This foundational session introduced participants to embodied self-awareness as the basis for collaborative work. Through accessible body-based practices and structured inquiry, participants explored how stress and trauma take shape across somatic, emotional, and cognitive domains. They learned to identify their stress and trauma responses in real-time, discern their usefulness to the actual situation, and choose effective strategies to regulate disproportionate responses. The session reframed resilience through a liberatory lens, recognizing that marginalized communities need these capacities not just to heal, but to transform the systems that traumatize them. As Nkem emphasized, “No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves and each other.”
Bold, Brave and Beautiful Movements Part 1: Embodied Capacities for Relational Ecosystems: Building on individual stabilization work, this session turned toward the relational capacities necessary for collective transformation. Participants explored four relational movements: coming together (the vulnerability of being witnessed and creating refuge), coming against (navigating conflict and power), coming alongside (the complexity of coalition and collaboration), and coming apart (the grief of rupture and transition). Using a variety of practices including Internal Family Systems work and the therapeutic tremor, which activates the mammalian stress/trauma reset reflex, participants examined how their systems respond within each relational movement and what becomes possible when navigating them with intentionality and care.
Re:Assemble Talk: Re-assembling and Rehearsing Flourishing Futures: The weekend culminated in a conversation between Nkem, Immandeep Kaur, Farzana Khan (Healing Justice London), Tumu Johnson (NHS/Sisters Uncut), Annette Dhami (Dark Matter Lab), and Melissa Mean (WeCanMake). This closing reflective session brought together participants to integrate learning from the weekend, explore collective strategies for transformation, and define actionable next steps for mobilizing together toward flourishing futures.
Each session was designed to be experiential and reflective, grounding participants in the first stage of trauma healing—stabilization and resourcing—which creates the foundation for deeper individual and collective transformation. The work acknowledged the reality of ongoing trauma (both interpersonal and systemic) and provided tools that work precisely in those conditions.
THE RESULTS
From “Nkem’s Hospital” to Movement Medicine: A Field Transformed
The impact of the embodied capacity work rippled through Re:Assemble with unexpected power. Responding to the need, Nkem held a separate gathering space in addition to the workshops to continue guiding participants through embodied capacity-building practices. Participants began nicknaming the workshop space “Nkem’s Hospital” because, as Melissa Mean, alumni of CIVIC SQUARE’s Material Matters learning journey, observed, “Everyone’s checking in for a bit of what’s needed.” People emerged from sessions visibly changed: more grounded, more present, more spacious. By the second day, trust had grown so noticeably that the number of people willing to engage in some of the more vulnerable practices multiplied dramatically.
Imandeep Kaur captured the palpable shift, asking, “What’s happening up there in Nkem’s hospital? People are coming down transformed.” From grassroots organizers to established theorists, participants experienced profound shifts, a powerful demonstration of how this work transcends siloed sectors and frameworks to address the whole person and their unique ecology.
Key outcomes included:
Recognition of the “Hidden Wiring”: Participants discovered what Stephanie Brobbey called “the hidden wiring that we don’t know that we need.” That hidden wiring is the embodied capacities that make collective transformation possible. For many participants encountering this work for the first time, there was immediate recognition of what had been missing. Organizations realized they could no longer afford to ignore the somatic dimension of their work. As Imandeep Kaur noted, without these capacities, teams remain stuck “trying to continually deal with downstream impacts” of trauma and conflict rather than building toward their vision.
From Intellectual Understanding to Embodied Knowing: The phased trauma healing framework provided participants with language and structure to understand their own processes. Stephanie Brobbey found the framework profoundly validating: “It helped me not only to understand my own process, but to understand some of the key relationships in my life, where the stages of trauma are visible but not discernible.” That is, the signs or effects of trauma are present and can be observed, but their true nature—that they’re specifically trauma-related patterns or stages—isn’t recognized or understood. The work named what’s at work under the surface, giving people vocabulary for their experience and concrete tools for transformation.
Practical Integration into Organizational Life: Unlike wellness programs that feel separate from “real work,” the Resilience Toolkit offered immediately applicable practices. Melissa Mean, founding director of WeCanMake, an innovative community land trust and a program that supports communities in creating affordable housing, described it as “a genuinely practical survival manual for the moment that we were in as an organization.” WeCanMake integrated concepts like “traits” (the core values that guide your mission) vs. “states” (adaptive responses to circumstances and challenges) and the “proportionality principle” (consciously choosing your perspective and response according to what’s actually useful) into their decision-making, finding that the tools gave their work “added weight and confidence.” Stephanie Brobbey noted she could use practices “daily, or like, if I’m on a call doing something”—invisible but powerful interventions woven into everyday work.
Liberation from Harmful Urgency: Perhaps most powerfully, the work helped participants distinguish between intentional responsiveness to the moment and harmful urgency driven by overwhelm. When people resisted slowing down due to crisis urgency, Nkem offered a reality check: “You’ve been running at top speed—did the genocide stop? Has it stopped yet?” This created space to examine whether rushing was actually effective or simply a way to avoid uncomfortable feelings of powerlessness and grief. Organizations could then move with “due speed” when genuinely needed, while avoiding the collapsing strategy that comes from constant urgency.
Stephanie Brobbey reflected on the necessity of this work for transforming the wealth advisory industry: “Our ability to do that effectively and support them to walk in right relationship with themselves and their resources requires an ability to withstand that pressure. That means we need to have the tools to tend to the soma, and to engage in somatic practice as a constant refrain.”
Transformation of Movement Culture: The work catalyzed a shift in how participants understood coalition building and collective work. Melissa Mean noted it helped her grasp “what it really means to be in coalition, what it really means to be in allyship,” recognizing that effective collaboration doesn’t require constant agreement but rather embodied capacity to navigate difference. This was particularly urgent given the political moment: “We need to mobilize, and we’re not all going to be best friends that always agree with each other all of the time, but we still have to be able to do the work.”
Meeting Propositional Work with Propositional Practice: Re:Assemble demonstrated that building alternatives requires not just technical innovation but transformed ways of being. Participants working on everything from neighborhood retrofit to alternative economics to wealth redistribution recognized that their propositional work—their attempts to make existing systems obsolete by building better ones—required propositional practice. As Nkem reminded them: “We say we want to build a liberatory world, yet we’re doing it from our heads, running from our bodies.” The embodied work offered a way to return to themselves, transform what needed transforming, and catalyze the liberatory impulses that move people toward each other and toward the futures they’re building.”It has to be visioned first,” Nkem emphasized, “In order to create a better world, we must first imagine her into being.”
CONCLUSION
The Connective Tissue of Transformation: Embodied Capacity as Movement Infrastructure
Re:Assemble demonstrated that embodied capacity is essential infrastructure for transformation, not a “nice to have.” The gathering revealed that conflict and burnout persist regardless of resources—the missing element is what Stephanie Brobbey called “the connective tissue, the rhythm that has to accompany our work.”
Practitioners proved hungry for tools that work in ongoing crises, not someday when things calm down. The work offered what Imandeep Kaur called “skillful holding”—acknowledging real pressures while helping people respond appropriately, creating pathways where “some people can slow down, some people can speed up a little bit” for collective balance.
Re:Assemble modeled weaving embodied practice throughout movement gatherings. The 26 concurrent sessions reflected the understanding that, as Melissa Mean put it, “the individual and the collective work” cannot be separated.
Most importantly, Re:Assemble created what Stephanie Brobbey called “a golden thread weaving through all of us”—a growing network of practitioners across movements who share embodied capacity frameworks and can resource themselves and each other. The gathering demonstrated that all possible futures exist now. The question is which ones will gather steam. With embodied capacity as foundational infrastructure, regenerative futures move from aspiration to practical possibility, from individual transformation to collective reality.
