"Act For What You Believe ”
-Overview-
A.R.T. Fusion Association created the “Act for what you believe” project as an answer to the needs of civil society representatives across Europe and Africa. They are dealing with diverse social problems and need competencies in new alternative methods for improving the situation of young people facing these various problems.
(The project took place between December 2012 and December 2013) AWB was developed as a capacity building project and youth workers coming from the NGOs (partners in the project) from Romania, Bulgaria, Ghana, Slovenia, Tanzania and Uganda developed practical competencies in working with Image and Forum Theatre for dealing more efficiently with social problems, conflicts and oppression from their community.
The main goal of the project was to increase the capacity of various youth organizations to raise the participation and involvement of young people in social processes and change.
The project achieved the following objectives:
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To develop and improve skills in non-formal education in general, and in particular in Theatre of the Oppressed methods for youth workers from Europe and Africa;
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To develop a network of Forum Theatre multipliers in various regions of Europe and Africa;
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To develop pro-active attitudes among the partner NGO members and also among the beneficiaries of the partners;
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To gain awareness of similarities and differences in social problems and kinds of oppression in different European and African countries;
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To develop a sense of common responsibility for the future of their local communities as well as the whole global community.
The project beneficiaries took part in a long term training course focused on developing practical working competencies in working with forum and image theatre methods. The training approach was designed as follows:
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An initial training for developing basic competencies in forum theatre method (took place in South Africa-May 2013),
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A practice phase in each of the partner countries (Romania, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Ghana (joined the project later), Tanzania, Uganda) where the multipliers prepared and implemented forum theatre initiatives for more than 700 young people in each community. The topics tackled were: school bullying; discrimination of HIV infected persons, gender discrimination, child labour, peer pressure, family psychological violence, sexual harassment, and gentrification. Some of these performances (and the public reactions and interventions) are described in the Forum Theatre examples chapter for a better understanding of the methodology.
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The practice phase was followed by a second training (in Romania-September 2013), for evaluating the practice phase and for developing advanced skills as multipliers in Image and Forum Theatre. The main aim of the training was to complete the set of competencies of the beneficiaries to become independent users of these methods. The training focused on sharing practices, feedback, upgrading skills in facilitation and jokering (as a crucial role in this methodology)
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A final evaluation meeting was organized in Tanzania in order to evaluate and assess the impact of the whole project and to plan how the network can continue to work in a coordinated manner from now on.
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Each partner also disseminated in their communities (among other organizations and interested people) the project results (including the movie and the toolkit) to increase the interest in their civil society toward this methodology.
The main project results included:
A network of Forum Theatre multipliers active in Africa and Europe;
More than 700 direct beneficiaries of the local projects, which we empowered and motivated to make a change in their lives (in connection with the social issues relevant for them); A resource movie based on the project development and experience (available online on http://www.youtube.com/user/artfusiontv );
This manual (which you are reading at the moment) represents a tool that could be used by any person interested to work with Forum or Image Theatre provides specific guidelines in this sense.
