Rights organizations across the UK are trying to sustain collective work inside conditions that steadily erode the capacities that work depends on. Chronic underfunding, political hostility, burnout, grief, overwork, and fragmentation shape the daily reality of many movement organizations. Under sustained pressure, urgency narrows attention toward immediate survival, conflict becomes harder to metabolize, and organizations committed to justice can begin reproducing the very dynamics they are trying to challenge: over-functioning, reactivity, collapse, disconnection, and domination.
In 2025, Lumos Transforms partnered with six rights organizations to deliver the Resilience Toolkit Capacity Building Program for UK Rights Organizations, an 11-week pilot involving 119 participants from Chayn, Counterpoints Arts, Food & Solidarity, FORWARD, MAC-UK, and Misery. Participants engaged in immersive Resilience Toolkit training and facilitated practice groups designed to help organizations stabilize the impacts of personal and collective trauma, interrupt the replication of oppressive dynamics, and lay the groundwork for cultures of interdependence, care, and shared purpose.
The Toolkit helps participants recognize stress and trauma responses in real time, discern whether those responses are proportionate, use bodymind practices to settle disproportionate activation and bring the nervous system into greater coherence, access greater internal safety, and build more capacity to stay present, relational, and responsive during intensity.
Alongside the program, Lumos conducted a mixed-methods developmental evaluation examining how and in what ways participants, relationships, and organizations shifted over the course of the pilot. The work was funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and individual supporters.
What emerged points toward a larger possibility: embodied and relational capacity may function as foundational infrastructure for durable collective action.
The issue was not willingness. It was feasibility.
Participants across the pilot consistently described organizations operating at or beyond capacity alongside caregiving demands, health challenges, economic precarity, and sustained emotional strain. Several organizations struggled to continue into later phases despite valuing the work deeply. Participation challenges reflected the cumulative effects of chronic overextension far more than lack of interest or trust. As the pilot report notes directly, “The issue, as reflected across both qualitative and quantitative data, was not willingness but feasibility.”
Even within those conditions, engagement remained strikingly strong:
- 82% of participants attended the first live immersion session
- 76% registered for practice groups
- many participants continued engaging through recordings and asynchronous materials when they could not attend live
Many movement and nonprofit spaces rely implicitly on people’s capacity to absorb escalating pressure indefinitely. What surfaced through the pilot was how profoundly chronic strain shapes organizations’ ability to remain collaborative, adaptive, and relational over time.
Participants repeatedly linked the value of the program to its pacing, consent-based structure, and emphasis on practicing proportionate responses rather than overriding limits in order to keep functioning. One participant reflected: “The way the programme frames participation as choice and only to be done if it is supportive was so refreshing compared to lots of other courses that do not take such care.”
Participants also described the shorter, rhythmic practice groups as workable within already overextended lives and organizations. The half-hour format created continuity without becoming another demand people had to force themselves through.
The structure of the program mattered because the work centered stabilization rather than performance. Participants practiced noticing stress activation earlier and recognizing when pressure was beginning to narrow perception or intensify reactivity, then using embodied practices to settle disproportionate responses, and responding more intentionally before conflict escalated or exhaustion tipped into collapse.
How stabilization shaped relationships and repair
Across the evaluation, a developmental sequence became visible:
stabilization → relationship → repair → re-patterning.
The strongest and earliest shifts appeared at the level of individual stabilization—participants’ growing ability to recognize and respond more proportionately to stress while remaining more internally safe, present, and relational under pressure. Within 11 weeks, participants demonstrated statistically significant improvements in:
- internal safety (+20.8%)
- discernment and proportionate response under stress (+20.3%)
- adaptive self-regulation (+20.8%)
- tolerance for strong emotion (+19.4%)
Some of the largest changes involved participants becoming more able to recognize what was happening internally before reactions escalated. Participants described distinguishing discomfort from genuine lack of safety, interrupting reactive cycles earlier, and staying present in situations that previously would have triggered shutdown, appeasement, or overreaction.
One participant shared: “I’m better able to tell when something is simply uncomfortable versus when it feels genuinely unsafe. This helps me stay in situations that are safe but challenging, which has supported my growth.”
Another reflected on how this shifted their behavior inside organizational relationships: “Before, my reaction to create inclusion came from my own need to fix things. Now I have more capacity to be present for that person rather than rushing to prove I’m listening or taking decisive action.”
These shifts began translating into organizational life outside the program itself. Participants reported greater boundary clarity, more capacity to stay engaged during conflict, and increasing ability to recover relationally after tension rather than moving immediately toward rupture or withdrawal.
Several participants described applying the practices directly during difficult conversations within their organizations and relationships. One participant reflected: “We stopped listening to each other…then I said, ‘This isn’t helping; you’re just reacting.’ She took it in, embodied it, and we came back into positive listening.”
Another described the significance more simply: “We stayed in the conversation. No one quit or fought.”
In movement ecosystems shaped by polarization, exhaustion, and sustained urgency, the ability to remain in relationship during tension carries real strategic significance. Without those capacities, disagreement hardens more quickly into fragmentation, trust becomes harder to sustain, coalition work becomes more brittle, and organizations struggle to coordinate effectively under pressure long enough for meaningful repair and strategy to emerge.
One participant articulated the political dimension of this process directly: “Our automatic ‘yes’ is an injustice we’ve learned to do to ourselves. Once you see that, it becomes harder to override it. If I can’t give justice to myself, how can I demand it for other people?”
Embodied and relational infrastructure
Teams participating in the pilot described early shifts that extended beyond individual coping or stress management. Participants reported more openness about wellbeing and limits, greater flexibility around workload and deadlines, increased tolerance for disagreement, and more distributed responsibility for collective care.
These organizational shifts emerged within just 11 weeks. The evaluation found early signs of structural integration rather than large-scale organizational transformation, which aligns with the program’s theory of change: building internal capacities that gradually expand outward into relational, organizational, and eventually structural change over time.
What became visible through the pilot were some of the underlying capacities that help organizations and movements continue functioning coherently under strain. The report frames these as forms of embodied and relational infrastructure that support groups’ ability to remain connected, adaptive, and collaborative under pressure: moving through disagreement without fragmentation, recovering from reactivity, sustaining trust during uncertainty, remaining capable of proportionate response under urgency, and engaging conflict without reproducing domination.
This framing shifts how burnout and fragmentation can be understood and addressed. The pilot suggests that embodied stabilization is a precondition for the relational capacities that allow people and organizations to continue working together over time.
As movements and rights organizations enter a period of sustained pressure, rather than episodic crisis, the capacity to remain relationally connected, adaptive, and responsive under strain becomes increasingly consequential for coalition work, movement sustainability, and long-term strategic effectiveness.
Building from pilot to ecosystem
The pilot also clarified the importance of sustained implementation structures. Participants consistently identified the need for ongoing practice, embedded facilitation capacity, compensated participation, accessible formats, leadership participation, and long-term organizational support for integration and culture change.
Those learnings are now shaping the next phases of the work.
Several participants have entered the Resilience Toolkit Facilitator Certification pathway, with ongoing mentorship focused on implementation inside their own organizations and communities.
At the same time, Lumos and partners are building on the pilot through a larger initiative focused on the UK migration sector. This project will train and support paid facilitators from migrant and diaspora communities to embed embodied and relational resilience practices across place-based networks of migration organizations over a multi-year implementation period. Trust for London, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Civic Power Fund, and AB Charitable Trust have already committed substantial funding to support the initiative’s development and launch this summer.
The Migration project grows directly from one of the clearest implications of the Rights Organization pilot: If movements are expected to navigate sustained destabilization over long periods of time, then embodied and relational capacity cannot remain peripheral to how social change infrastructure is understood, developed, and resourced.
The pilot offers early evidence that these capacities can be cultivated intentionally, even inside environments marked by exhaustion and scarcity. More importantly, it suggests that embodied and relational capacity belong much closer to the center of how movements, funders, and systems-change practitioners think about infrastructure itself.
Because the question facing many organizations now is no longer simply how to keep people going. It is how people remain capable of empathic relational connection, radical collective imagination, and sustainable ways of working together while living inside conditions engineered to fracture trust, narrow possibility, and exhaust collective capacity.
Read the pilot report here: Embodied Resilience as Infrastructure for Collective Liberation: Early Evidence from the Resilience Toolkit Capacity Building Program for UK Rights Organizations
