Strong movements are built on more than shared analysis or strategy. They are sustained by relationships. Relationships that can hold disagreement. Relationships that can adapt when circumstances shift. Relationships that allow us to celebrate victories, move through grief, and remain connected during moments of crisis and uncertainty.
And yet, the pace and pressure of our conditions often leave little room to tend to the very relationships that make our work possible. Urgency, burnout, shifting roles, and competing priorities can make it difficult to show up for one another in ways that reflect our values.
This interactive workshop invites participants to explore the practices that help relationships grow and endure within organizations, coalitions, and movement spaces.
Together, we’ll reflect on what builds trust, what weakens it, and the choices that shape how we relate to one another over time. Through dialogue, storytelling, reflection, and embodied practice, participants will deepen their awareness of their own relational patterns while exploring approaches that strengthen collaboration, accountability, and solidarity.
Together, we will explore:
- The conditions that help people experience trust, belonging, and accountability in collective spaces, and the patterns that can strain them.
- Our conflict styles: how we each respond when relationships are under pressure, what we tend to protect or prioritize, and how we can practice staying grounded and connected through moments of tension.
- Solidarity practices that help us invest in relationships before conflict arises and support repair, accountability, and renewed trust when relationship fissures arise.
The strength of our movements is shaped through the choices we make every day. How we listen. How we respond. How we share power. How we repair. How we celebrate and care for one another. This workshop creates space to notice those choices, practice new ways of relating, and strengthen the relationships that allow our organizations, coalitions, and movements to flourish and build the power we need.
Facilitator Bio:
Born in Baltimore and raised in Festac Town, Nigeria, Adaku comes from a long lineage of organizers, farmers, and healers. This legacy grounds their work as a grassroots strategist, organizer, abolitionist healer, movement facilitator, and spiritual ecologist. Their work is both political and deeply personal, a practice of love and commitment to their communities.
For over twenty years, Adaku has worked alongside movements for gender, reproductive, racial, youth, and healing justice, supporting leaders and organizations in cultivating strategic, sustainable, and liberatory ways of working together to build power. They believe in building movements that not only change systems but also deepen our capacity to care for one another, remain connected, and become more alive and present with this sacred life.
Adaku currently serves as the Director of Movement Building Programs at the Building Movement Project, where they work with movement-building organizations on both short-term rapid-response efforts and long-term power building ecosystem strategy. They also co-host and uplift narrative power through the Solidarity Is This podcast, facilitate transformative trainings and gatherings, and develop tools and practices to strengthen solidarity across movements.
Previously, they served as the Organizing Director at the National Network of Abortion Funds, where they helped build collective power with 90+ member organizations, thousands of members, and movement leaders across the country.
For the past ten years, Adaku has also co-facilitated Harriet’s Apothecary, an all-Black collective of healers, cultural workers, and organizers committed to carrying forward Harriet Tubman’s legacy of abolition and healing justice as core strategies for liberation.
They are a Senior Teacher and Coach with BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), and a teacher and practitioner with multiple local and national embodied leadership programs, supporting movements in their work to transform the conditions that shape our lives—by transforming the body, the collective, and our possibilities.
At the heart of their work is the belief that liberation is something we practice together: through relationship, through the body, through spirit, and through how we choose to show up with the Earth.