GTA facilitation team
Last month, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) completed six years of weaving and connecting networks of Alternatives around the globe. In this message to the constituents of the process, the GTA facilitation team celebrates and reflects on their journey of creating processes of confluence and solidarity through weaver dialogues, assemblies and gatherings, collaborative documentation and mapping, mutual recognition, amongst many other activities.
The Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) was formally launched on 16th May 2019, after some years of informal discussions with groups around the world. Over these years, the GTA has become a space for supporting, documenting, visibilising, connecting, and weaving some of the most amazing, grounded counter-movements of alternatives in various parts of the globe. This is perhaps a small cause for cheer, even in the midst of the horrifying multi-crises across the world.
The GTA family now consists of four Weavers, 80 organisational Endorsers, a Facilitation Team with 24 members, and a number of Working Groups and Thematic Groups handling specific tasks and responsibilities. Together, these form the General Assembly, the main global forum for decision-making and review of GTA’s activities.
Since 2019, GTA has engaged in multiple activities:
- Helping strengthen or enable Weavers – forums or platforms that bring together radical alternatives across sectors and geographies – and dialogues (physical and online) between them
- Encourage documentation and visibilisation of such alternatives, through its Regenerative Communities volumes and its bimonthly periodical Weaving Alternatives, webinar series or individual episodes on different topics, and focussed reports on documenting articulation of crises and weaving alternatives
- Networking and outreach on diverse topics such as Alternative Learning and Education, Solidarity Economies, Alternative Energy, Alternative Security, and Radical Democracy and Autonomy
- Creation of interactive tools for further weaving and networking, including an interactive collaborative documentation and mapping of radical alternatives around the world
- Generating a global process to connect and strengthen Radical Democracy and Autonomy practice and worldviews, including physical confluences, documentation, mutual recognition, collective declarations, and a proposed Global Alliance
- Internal seminars on key themes to clarify common and different understandings of the terms, concepts, practices that we embody across the world
- Stimulating a platform, Adelante, where global networks and movements can come together for synergistic visioning and activities
- Stimulating a global network, PeDAGoG, of academics-activists in the ‘higher education’ area, to share courses, pedagogies, methods, and stimulate more spaces for alternative learning
- Organising physical dialogues and other sessions at global events, such as World Social Forum, climate COPs, Stockholm+50, degrowth conferences.
- Provide solidarity and support for communities and initiatives under threat
- Developing a toolkit for weaving to support the creation of new weavers in other regions and help strengthen the work of those already active
- Developing an online dictionary platform – which will launch in September 2025– that will continue previous efforts to map, document and visibilise concepts, cosmo experiences and practices beyond capitalist modernity around the world.
Many of these activities have been in collaboration with Weavers, Endorsers, and others – these are also forms of weaving, and are crucial for the steady spread of the GTA.
Importantly, we have not tried to expand either the GTA family or its activities too fast, mindful of the need for deliberate mindfulness in building relations of trust, and not making the mistake many global processes have made of becoming too big too fast, having to set up bureaucratic systems to manage this, and compromising on original principles. It is not easy – or rather, it is very hard! – to establish and sustain a global process without centralization and unequal hierarchies, and we have tried to be conscious of processes that can enable this. We have also tried to ensure that GTA remains firmly rooted to the ground through its constituent community networks, while working at global levels – and in some way to actually even dissolve the false ‘local-global’ dualism.
We recognize, however, that there is a long, long way to go, and that even in these six years there are a number of things we could have done better, or more. We are still struggling, for instance, in working out how weaving across cultures, geographies, sectors and movements can be better done, in a way that helps us become a stronger global critical mass to tackle the macro-issues we face. We continue to need advice and help in how to become a space with greater sensitivity to issues that the most marginalized face – women and minority genders/sexualities, Indigenous peoples and other local communities, industrial and agricultural workers, species other than the human, and so on. There is a strength in the fact that most of the Facilitation Team, which holds the process together, is voluntary; but this also imposes time and energy constraints.
No celebration is complete without art. We share a poem of revolutionary hope for the Global Tapestry of Alternatives by Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, a member of the GTA Facilitation Team-
Still We Weave
In the wreckage of empire,
where monocultures split the soil
and tomorrow was sold by the ounce—
still, we planted seeds.
Not because the wind was gentle,
not because the earth welcomed us,
but because we knew:
another world was not just possible—
it was already sprouting,
quietly, beneath the noise.
We did not rush.
We gathered threads—
from forest councils and women fishers,
from barefoot children and rebel farmers,
from those who speak to mountains
and those who write with fire.
We chose the slow road,
the one without central command,
where decisions are made by listening,
and trust is a currency
that cannot be counterfeited.
This is a movement led by the Majority World—
by those most dispossessed:
the landless, the silenced, the violated,
those whose stories were erased by conquest,
but who now reclaim the loom
with their hands and their hearts.
We met in circles,
spoke in many tongues,
danced across the false borderlines
between “local” and “global,”
theory and soil,
memory and possibility.
We mourned the lost—
the species vanished, the rivers muted,
the tongues murdered,
the dreams betrayed.
And still, we wove.
We wove solidarity from scarcity,
care from the cracks,
resistance from heartbeat rhythms.
And when they asked,
what is your strategy?
we said:
to remember we are not alone.
To center the margins.
To visibilize what capitalist modernity hides.
To dream without borders—
and then build those dreams.
Yes, the crises are real,
the weight of the world is heavy.
But so too is the laughter in our kitchens,
the liberation in walking slowly,
the fierce joy of collective knowing.
Six years on, we are not perfect, but we are present.
We are grounded, not frozen.
We hold hands across time zones,
embrace contradictions without shame,
cup the future like a fragile bowl—
not to possess it,
but to offer it,
whole.
This is our revolutionary hope:
not that the world will change
because we forced it—
but that it already is changing
because we remembered
how to weave anyway.
This article was originally published on the GTA website.
The Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) is an initiative seeking to create solidarity networks and strategic alliances amongst all these alternatives on local, regional and global levels. Find out more about the GTA’s work, including past and upcoming webinars, statements and declarations, and periodicals on their website.