How GPI’s System Aligns with Established Models for Systemic Change
The Group Project Initiative (GPI) framework is strategically designed to address systemic overwhelm, learned helplessness, and isolation, guiding individuals toward sustained engagement and long-term movement-building. GPI is not focused on mobilization alone—it is structured to shift culture, embed activism into daily life, and create infrastructure that outlasts any single crisis or campaign.
This document outlines the theoretical models and frameworks that support GPI’s approach, demonstrating how the system aligns with established research on social change, movement-building, decolonization, and long-term power shifts.
Why This Works
GPI’s system is not just an engagement model—it is a strategic, evidence-based approach to movement-building that integrates the most effective frameworks for power-building, culture-shifting, and long-term sustainability.
By drawing from:
Two Loops Theory, GPI is not just resisting the current system but building the next one.
Freire’s Pedagogy, GPI is ensuring that knowledge and action are inseparable.
Movement Ecology, GPI is leveraging multiple approaches simultaneously to create systemic change.
Critical Mass Theory, GPI is strategically scaling engagement to force institutional shifts.
Decolonial Theory, GPI is rejecting burnout culture and building sustainable activism.
This system is designed to not only mobilize people but keep them engaged for life, ensuring that activism is not just something people do—it is something they live.
Two Loops Theory of Change
Two Loops Theory explains how systemic transformation happens in parallel waves:
The decline of the old system as its inefficiencies, contradictions, and failures become more visible.
The rise of the new system as innovators, bridge-builders, and early adopters create alternative structures that will eventually replace the old system.
GPI operates within this second loop—rather than simply critiquing the dominant system, it is actively building the new one by:
Creating alternative media ecosystems (On Canada Project) that challenge dominant narratives.
Building third spaces for social good (SGCC) that model new forms of civic and community engagement.
Providing action-based learning hubs (15TGAF) that replace traditional, often exclusionary educational spaces.
Embedding activism into institutions (Influence & Integrate), ensuring that culture and policy shifts occur simultaneously.
GPI does not position itself as a reformist model—it is constructing parallel infrastructure that will outlast failing systems.
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Freire’s work emphasizes that education must be liberatory, participatory, and rooted in lived experience. Instead of treating people as passive recipients of information, true education requires dialogue, reflection, and action.
GPI integrates this framework by:
Rejecting hierarchical knowledge transfer—instead of a traditional top-down education model, GPI creates interactive, participatory learning spaces through SGCC and 15TGAF.
Framing education as action-oriented—the goal is not just awareness but critical thinking that leads to engagement.
Encouraging community-driven learning—social issues are not taught at people but with them, centering lived experience as expertise.
This aligns directly with Educate & Activate, where the focus is on giving people the knowledge they need while ensuring that learning leads to action.
Movement Ecology Framework
Freire’s work emphasizes that education must be liberatory, participatory, and rooted in lived experience. Instead of treating people as passive recipients of information, true education requires dialogue, reflection, and action.
GPI integrates this framework by:
Rejecting hierarchical knowledge transfer—instead of a traditional top-down education model, GPI creates interactive, participatory learning spaces through SGCC and 15TGAF.
Framing education as action-oriented—the goal is not just awareness but critical thinking that leads to engagement.
Encouraging community-driven learning—social issues are not taught at people but with them, centering lived experience as expertise.
This aligns directly with Educate & Activate, where the focus is on giving people the knowledge they need while ensuring that learning leads to action.
Critical Mass Theory
Chenoweth’s research demonstrates that when just 3.5% of a population actively participates in sustained activism, systemic change becomes inevitable.
GPI’s system is designed to scale toward this tipping point by:
Moving people through a structured pipeline—the five-stage model ensures that individuals progress from awareness to long-term, embedded activism.
Focusing on the disengaged middle—GPI does not need to convert everyone, only enough people consistently engaging in action to force institutional shifts.
Making action accessible and habitual—through 15TGAF and SGCC, activism becomes part of daily life rather than a one-time event.
This structured approach ensures a high retention rate—rather than fleeting moments of engagement, individuals become ongoing participants in culture shift.
Decolonial Theory & The Rejection of White Supremacy Culture
White supremacy culture upholds urgency, perfectionism, individualism, and scarcity as dominant values—creating burnout, extractive activism, and exclusionary organizing models. GPI intentionally resists these patterns by:
Centring collective care & sustainability (Rest & Joy)—valuing activists as whole humans rather than seeing them as disposable labour for movements.
Rejecting urgency culture—building long-term, deep engagement models rather than reactionary, short-term mobilization.
Prioritizing accessibility & inclusivity—ensuring that participation in activism is not just for the privileged few with time, resources, or academic expertise.
Building relational, community-driven movements (SGCC & Influence & Integrate)—emphasizing relationships over transactionality.
GPI is not just fighting for change—it is modeling a new way of organizing that is anti-oppressive at its core.