Oxygen Consortium: best practices for capacity building in social movements using Ulex Project as an example

Oxygen Consortium’s mission

In 2023, with the support of Magda Adamowicz (Araminta) and funding from the Open Society Foundation, we established Oxygen Consortium – an international alliance of donor, human rights, and civil society organizations that collaborate to strengthen community resilience and promote safe working conditions for those aiming to make social change happen. Our goals include connecting organizations across sectors and countries, advancing regeneration and self-care practices, and supporting social leaders in developing healthy and sustainable work cultures. We also recommend tools that enhance mental, physical, and financial well-being.

Through collaboration with diverse NGOs worldwide, we have identified recurring patterns, challenges, and effective approaches that contribute to long-term social impact. This article uses the example of Ulex Project, one of our partner organizations, to demonstrate how thoughtful funding and organizational strategy can reinforce long-term learning and resilience of social movements. It also offers insights on how funding entities’ support can serve civil society organizations and their teams more effectively.

About Ulex Project

Ulex Project is a capacity-building organization from Catalonia, Spain. Their mission is to support European social movements. Capacity building is a process of strengthening organizations and networks by developing their personal competencies and organizational capabilities, resources, and structures to help them stay resilient, effective, and adaptable over time.

They focus on supporting education and creating space for reflection and growth for social movements. Target groups for their activities include diverse movement actors – from grassroot groups, through NGOs to big networks and coalitions. Using a psychosocial approach to resilience, Ulex aims to shift the discourse on well-being from individual responsibility towards a systemic perspective. Their work addresses multiple layers: individual/intrapersonal, interpersonal relationships, group dynamics, social movements and interorganizational dynamics – all within specific political and social contexts. 

Their main activity is to provide tailored training for activists and organizations. The method they use during courses enables participants to go beyond the cycle of doing → experiencing → doing. To internalize knowledge, analyze, plan strategically, and learn from mistakes, individuals and groups need to pause and create spaces for deeper reflection. 

Ulex Project’s activities

Ulex Project focuses on building capacities that are essential for social movements, NGOs, and related organizations to be effective in the long term and drive complex change:

• Disruptive capacity (often associated with grassroots movements) refers to drawing attention to social problems by challenging the status quo, organizing protests, and highlighting injustice.
• Institutional capacity is the ability to create, reform, or influence institutions so that social change can also happen at the institutional level and be sustained over time.
• Narrative capacity concerns shaping how individuals perceive the world through storytelling, influencing public discussions, and showing inspiring visions of the future.
• Prefigurative capacity reflects the ability of movements and organizations to embody the change they seek by aligning their methods with their values, through cooperation, ethical practices, and inclusive organizational culture.
• Resilience is the capacity to remain engaged over the long term, even under conditions of pressure and uncertainty, without burning out.
• Finally, cooperation capacity refers to the ability to work effectively within organizations, across groups, and in the wider social movement, so that collective activities have a greater impact on society.

Some organizations focus on just one of these capacities, but all these elements are needed across different actors to achieve social change. These areas can benefit from educational support, space for reflection, and exchange of ideas. Many actors need to work together to build different capacities – only then can social movements remain strong and resilient as a whole.

How does funding shape the reality of NGOs?

Currently, funding schemes for social movements are largely built around short-term, project-based models that prioritize actions and quick results. This leads to a phenomenon called “grant dependency” that occurs when organizations become overly reliant on grants, leading to tensions, stress, and financial uncertainty. There are no funds specifically for education, institutional development, and processes to strengthen the organizations. This approach reinforces a culture in which constant “doing → experiencing → doing” becomes central, often at the expense of reflection, knowledge exchange, self-development, and deeper, long-term strategic planning.

This is reinforced by an additional layer of urgency, driven both by rapidly changing external events and a culture of constant action within organizations. As a result, learning opportunities, experimenting with new approaches, or developing long-term strategies are frequently marginalized. Juggling multiple tasks and chasing further outputs becomes the priority.

While some donors have begun to recognize the limitations of models that rely solely on measurable, short-term outcomes, organizations still operate within a culture of “goal measuring”, which means that they must show effectiveness and achieve measurable outcomes – the faster, the better. Yet it usually takes much longer for a meaningful social change to unfold. Eventually, it may bring significantly different results from the initial project intentions. If tangible results remain central to funding frameworks, the next question that arises is…

How to measure success?

For organizations like Ulex – ones that aim to bring about social change – success depends on the impact they have on their partners. However, measuring this impact may be challenging since social change is often qualitative and unfolds over the long term. Questions that could help assess their success include:

• Are partner organizations changing their approach from reactive activity towards more strategic responsiveness after training?
• How to capture the change? Is there a space for reflection and analysis of experiences in the partner organization?
• Do leaders and teams of partner organizations have the opportunity to pause, assess their actions, and consciously plan the future?

In other words, success is reflected in partner organizations gaining the time and space to reflect on their work and getting more mindful while planning their next steps. One of the factors that makes supporting partners possible is the organization’s financial stability, which in turn relies on secure funding. Let us now reflect on what it means in practice.

Funding of the organization

The Ulex team consists of around twenty people, including the on-site team at their training center. Much of their funding comes from external programs, as specific funding allocated for capacity-building is limited and often complemented with money from private foundation grants. Understanding that there are risks associated with relying on a single donor (for example, becoming susceptible to sudden budget cuts, inability to experiment with new ideas caused by uncertainty, strategic dependency, and insecurity when thinking about long-term goals), they try to diversify their funding sources. This approach not only showcases good financial planning and provides more stability, but also allows for exploring new working methods and supporting partners more effectively.

What changes could organizations benefit from?

Strategic thinking about funding within an organization is one thing. The other is the way funding programs function. Grantmaking is an essential part of the NGO world – support from donors strengthens organizations, making it possible for them to plan activities that contribute to social change. Therefore, below are several practical recommendations on what may be improved in order to make support for teams such as Ulex Project even more effective.

Shifts in funding and support practices could significantly strengthen the team capacity of organizations. Simplifying reporting and administrative procedures would mean spending less time on bureaucracy, freeing up time and energy for their core work – planning social projects, training sessions, and providing support to partner organizations.

Resources should be allocated toward sustainable organizational capacity, not only project-based activities. It is hard to plan projects while being concerned about funding and waiting on grant cycles, especially with a small team where people often take on multiple roles. When resources are scarce, the organization cannot prioritize long-term initiatives and continuity of activities is key to creating long-lasting impact.

However, social change is not achieved by a single organization. Therefore, we can repeat once more after Ulex: creating spaces designed for reflection and peer learning is crucial for organizations to exchange insights, adapt more effectively, develop new strategies, and become more resilient.

How can you use Ulex’s services?

If you want to get to know more about Ulex’s approach to social movement training, here is a more detailed explanation of their approach and their training programme. 

If you are part of a social movement or an organisation that could benefit from capacity building, please send an e-mail: info@ulexproject.org.

If you want to strategically support the development and growth of European Social movements, you can support Ulex’s work through a donation or by developing a project with them.