81: Social Movement Activism with Eleanor Moore

Eleanor shares her experiences and reflections on working closely
with social movement activists for over 20 years. She lives in a
Catalonian mountain village, where the Ulex Project she works for
runs training and capacity-building events for a wide range of
social movements. Eleanor reflects on the changes she has
witnessed in social movement activists over time, such as how the
hope for big social change has decreased due to the poly-crisis
and complexity of the world's challenges.

Simon and Eleanor discuss how the ideology of neo-liberalism
presents itself as TINA, ‘there is no alternative’, which has
been very effective in reducing expectations and diminishing the
hope of change. Activists need to sustain and energise
themselves, and Eleanor shares how Buddhism has helped her
decenter her individualism, and expand her relationality to all
beings.

She shares how rock climbing provides her best leadership model,
as when climbing there is total reliance on the
leadership-followership relationship, and how the best plans get
undone usually by nature intervening, forcing an emergent
mindset.

Bio 
Eleanor Moore is part of the Ulex Project core team that provides
pan-European capacity-building support for social movements. Her
role bridges facilitation, developing partnerships, governance,
strategy, and programme evaluation. 

She is embedded in practices of distributed leadership,
solidarity economy, and mutual care—a daily exploration of
prefiguration.

Before Ulex, Eleanor spent 10 years working across diverse social
projects in the UK, such as housing, legal, and horticultural
projects. These experiences and an immersion in critical theory
in her early 20s led to an ongoing life exploration of the
connections between the personal, the interpersonal, the
socio-political, and the ecological.

A climber of many years, she finds respite, sanctuary, and
sense-making on high exposed ledges, hanging out with lichen and
vultures, and connecting with the perspectives of the non-human
world.