Ansuz Action
What we do
Ansuz Action helps local leaders and organisations to ignite change from below and build resilient, engaged and active neighbourhoods. We do this by providing training and development to community organisers and by supporting organisations to make ultra-inclusive engagement the norm.
We base all our work with you around our community organising ethos and methodology.
Community organising
As you may already know, community organising is a highly skilled approach to social change, requiring advanced expertise in listening, questioning, collaborating, leadership and problem solving. Community organisers also need deep reserves of resilience, self-belief and confidence. And as any organisation that does community organising will tell you, it’s an approach that requires a change of mindset, resolve, patience and a willingness to disrupt the status quo.
However the rewards are tremendous and far-reaching. Whether you are a community organiser or an organisation wanting to embrace community organising, we can help you to embed:
- High levels of public participation
- Practical solutions to local issues by the people for the people
- Locally-grown leaders of active campaigns and communities
- Greater accountability of people in positions of responsibility and influence
- Equal participation in local power structures and decision-making processes.
- Assertive and proactive local communities, who can take what is rightfully theirs.
You will find that community organising is powerful and progressive – and the benefits it brings are needed now more than ever before!
Benefits such as:
- Improved relationships between you and the community you are working with
- Better understanding of what really matters to local people
- Greater awareness of what the community expects from you
- Appreciation by the community of your role and responsibilities
- Co-operation and solidarity around important issues
- More informed and better-quality decision making
- Access to a greater resources such as knowledge and skills
How we can help
Support for
individuals
Support for Are you craving peer support, critical reflection and the chance to share and solve particularly knotty challenges and campaigns with fellow organisers?
Are you looking for ways to develop and challenge your community organising team?
We can help you by:
- being a sounding board or critical friend around a particular situation
- training on topics where you feel you have gaps in your knowledge or skills
- facilitating staff training or away days to embed community organising practice into your staff team.
- linking you up with other practitioners and projects to gain knowledge and skills from collective experience
Take a look at our Organising for Power Circle, a professional development membership network for experienced organisers, our action learning sets to develop reflective action, and our Velocity sessions for laser focused personal coaching. And for your team, take a look at our range of training and development courses and resources.
Support for
organisations
Support for Are you a community organisation with local stakeholders, a council neighbourhoods team, or someone with an engagement remit in another kind of organisation?
Have you realised that bog-standard community engagement and outreach doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to building deep and lasting agency and empowerment?Are you up for building genuine collaboration, that kick-starts people to take up their own reins and lead on the change that matters to them most?We can help you to develop a roadmap, embed your strategy, support you to roll it out, expertly guide you, lighten the load and help you head off and solve problems along the way.The sorts of things we do include:- map and analyse your starting point
- co-create and facilitate a change process with you
- train you, your team or your organisation in a community organising approach
- helping you to design a new project or organisation with community organising principles embedded.
- offer advice, insight and external animation along your journey
- create an action learning space for experienced community leaders and managers to come together to solve problems and make breakthroughs.
What our clients say
About Ansuz
Ansuz Action is Helen Wallis-Dowling and Ruth Parkinson. Helen and Ruth are long time colleagues and friends. We each have over 25 years experience of working with people, teams, communities and organisations. We enjoy working together and we’re an effective, creative and knowledgeable team.
And fun to work with!
About us
Why Ansuz?
You might be wondering what on earth ‘Ansuz’ (pronounced ann-suhz) is all about. Well, we were casting around for a name and at a risk of being a bit up ourselves, decided to go with an Icelandic rune. Runes are an early simple writing and meaning system and, it is said, also act as magic charms. The rune Ansuz is associated with ‘reason, analysis and advice, connecting and networking, inspiration and listening to oneself and one’s own particular inner voice’. So there we are.
For more see http://runesecrets.com/rune-meanings/ansuz
Here are some of the principles, processes and methods that inspire us and underpin our work.
We also sell resource packs to help you DIY, and run on-line action learning sets
This section provides links to organisations and people we think are doing great and much needed work. We update it regularly so do keep checking in.
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Get in touch
Do email us if you’d like to explore how we can support you and your programme or organisation. We’d love to hear from you.
Also please connect if you are doing similar or complementary work – let’s share ideas and action.