"Elegant and incendiary." — Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything
"A crucial resource for change-makers." — Archbishop Desmond Tutu, anti-apartheid and human rights activist
This deck is comprised of key strategies and tactics that have inspired centuries of people-powered victories; and they are now in a deck of 100+ cards that you can play!
Use this deck to get creatively unstuck, design an action that pops, flashcard your way through social movement history, learn and teach organizing, win grassroots victories, or just have fun staying up late with friends playing Radical Charades.
Beautiful Trouble: Strategy Card Deck is a collaboration between The TESA Collective and Beautiful Trouble.
Here's what comes in the box:
- 126 over-sized cards
- How to Play Booklet
- Bullhorn and 100,000 people not included
These Strategy Cards were compiled by over 170 grassroots activists from across 5 continents in 7 languages, featuring notable movement strategists including Arundhati Roy, George Monbiot, and Mark and Paul Engler.
Each card includes a unique QR code. Use your smartphone camera to automatically pop up a link to the full version of each card in the Beautiful Trouble online toolbox.
The cards in Beautiful Trouble can be used for a variety of purposes, and the deck also comes with rules on how to use them to play six different mini-games! These games are:
- Cardstorm!
- Radical Charades
- Design a Creative Action
- Cards for Humanity
- Divine the Future
- Eternal Debates
The suits (categories) in the deck are as follows:
- Tactics: Specific forms of creative action, such as a flash mob or blockade.
- Principles: Hard-won insights that can guide or inform creative action design.
- Theories: Big-picture concepts and ideas that help us understand how the world works and how we might go about changing it.
- Stories: Accounts of memorable actions and campaigns, analysing what worked (or didn’t) and why. Useful for illustrating how principles, tactics, theories and methodologies can be successfully applied in practice.
- Methodologies: Strategic frameworks and hands-on exercises to help you assess your situation and plan your campaign.
- Debates: Eternal controversies (such as, change the world or change yourself?) that must be constantly wrestled with.
“This invaluable tool will spark a million creative actions that might just change the world for the better.” — Søren Warburg, ActionAid Denmark
“Our work to stop Trump's disastrous Wall required a wide spectrum of activist skills, and Beautiful Trouble helped provide critical support — from strategic training tools to advice on deploying creative actions. We used the card deck in our very first training and it was a big hit!” —Raquel de Anda, No Border Wall Coalition, Laredo, TX
Need more than a card deck to achieve your mission? Contact Beautiful Trouble’s seasoned training team to skill up your crew!
Graphic Designers: Gan Golan, Eduarda Aun, Cristian Fleming, Diana Haj Ahmad
Beautiful Trouble Team: Rae Abileah, Nadine Bloch, Andrew Boyd, Chelsea Byers, Adrian Carpenter, Juman Abujbara, Phil Wilmot, Dave Mitchell, Marcel Taminato, Mara Ranville, Sungu Oyoo
Special thanks to ActionAid Denmark and the 20+ partner organizations who have helped get this revolutionary tool into the hands of change-makers across the world!