Progressive movements in the UK are full of talented, passionate organisers doing vital work. But too often, that work happens in silos. Groups with shared goals don’t talk to each other. Organisations that could be powerful allies get stuck on their differences. And the collective power needed to confront rising authoritarianism remains unrealised.
Ecosystem facilitation is our response to this problem. It’s the practice of strengthening the connective tissue between movements, organisations, and organisers, supporting them to build relationships, align strategically, and act collectively. Where traditional facilitation typically works within a single group or organisation, ecosystem facilitation operates at the level of the wider movement landscape: brokering connections, navigating tensions between groups, and creating the conditions for collaboration to emerge across organisational boundaries.
What does this look like in practice?
This work takes several interconnected forms.
Alliance building means supporting diverse groups to find common ground and develop shared positions, even when they differ in ideology, strategy, tactics, or constituency. Often this means working with people before they’ve identified a clear desire to collaborate, helping them move past purity politics, clashing ways of working, and fear of association that frequently keep progressive movements fragmented. The aim is never to flatten difference. It’s to help groups understand difference well enough to build genuine solidarity, and ultimately, collective power.
Strategy exchange spaces bring organisers together across movements to share their theories of change, surface key objections to each other’s approaches, and develop a clearer collective picture of the strategic landscape. These are structured, curated encounters, not networking events. They’re designed to generate the kind of shared analysis and mutual understanding that makes coordinated action possible. Over time, they build the relational infrastructure for movement-level strategy: the trust, language, and relationships that diverse movements need if they are to act as a unified force rather than a collection of isolated campaigns. We’re currently developing this format, so stay tuned for more!
Connecting movement infrastructure organisations extends this logic to the organisations that support movements: training providers, facilitators, funders, researchers, and platform builders. By mapping and connecting these actors, ecosystem facilitation helps the sector become more coordinated, identifying gaps, reducing duplication, and ensuring that support reaches the groups and communities that need it most. This includes developing communities of practice among facilitators and support workers, so that the collective capacity of the field grows alongside the movements it serves.
What distinguishes ecosystem facilitation from other forms of movement support is its responsiveness and its systemic orientation. This isn’t project-based work with neat deliverables. It’s relational, adaptive, and often ad hoc, responding to the needs of the ecosystem as they emerge. It starts from the understanding that the progressive movement landscape is not a machine to be engineered but an ecology to be tended: one where collective agency arises through connection, trust, and the slow accumulation of shared understanding.
One example from last year’s The World Transformed bears repeating: When multiple factions that wanted to push for internal democracy within Your Party organised to meet, they were at risk of spending their limited time together getting lost in differences. We facilitated a process that helped them develop shared positions and build a common platform, which they took to TWT’s third assembly, where it passed with an overwhelming majority. The group has since consolidated under the label Democratic Socialists of Your Party, and continues to organise together.
This kind of work can’t easily be packaged into project-based funding bids. Often it means offering our skills on an ad hoc basis, facilitating groups to come together who don’t even know if they like each other yet, let alone whether they want to allocate budget to the process.
Why this matters now
The appetite for collaboration is there. Organisers are ready. But they keep hitting the same pitfalls: a purity-politics mentality that breeds fear of being sullied by association, clashing ways of working, and getting lost in the detail of differences. These are the aspects of leftist culture we all know are holding us back.
The political moment demands it. As authoritarianism rises and progressive movements face mounting pressure, the cost of fragmentation grows steeper. We can’t afford to keep working in parallel when we could be working together. Ecosystem facilitation is one way to get there: not by imposing unity from above, but by building it from within, one relationship, one conversation, one shared strategy at a time.
If you’re interested in learning more about our ecosystem facilitation work, or if you think your organisation or network could benefit from this kind of support, get in touch!