Tailored training

GALE offers "tailored" training, which means we offer training sessions that are custom-made for your organization. Our trainings focus on three main areas: advocacy, safer schools and storytelling/peer-education.

Advocacy training

For advocacy organizations we offer expertise on the right to education and how to monitor and measure (homophobic, transphobic) discrimination, always in the context of wider social exclusion issues and school safety and quality. In such trainings we also offer information and concrete exercises on strategic planning. We have noticed that LGBT organizations often feel blocked because of their strong mission and sense of justice on one hand, and continuous challenges, resistance and threats on the other hand. In these trainings we create space to reflect on this and deal with it.
Participants' comments on this these trainings:

The training gave me a sense of solace, it was a healing experience. We sometimes feel so overpowered, so lost and so alone in this struggle. Now I realize we are not alone. Even our "enemies" may feel the same sense of threat. This gives me new power to reach out. (a female participant in a training for a coalition of Korean activists, 2013)
Our organization has a strong sense of purpose, but a membership is diverse and everybody want to be engaged in everything. This training made us a better understanding that "strategic planning" means making choices and limiting yourself to be more effective. (a male participant in a strategic planning training for the European Platform of LGBT Christians)

Safer school training

For schools, we offer training on how to make their schools safer and how to improve their diversity policy. Of course we focus on sexual diversity, but the starting points and methods and easily applicable to school safety on the hole and dealing with diversity in general. Still, our training is quite different from regular "diversity trainings" because it goes more in depth about social exclusion and how to tackle it in schools and youth organizations.
The content of the training can focus on school management and strategically planning a comprehensive change, on teaching about sexual diversity or/and on student development and counseling. Although these three topics are interrelated, the required (management, teaching or counseling) skills of school staff are different. So when asking for a tailored training on this, be sure to make choices on what the topic should be. each topic costs at least four hours to tackle, but a day per topic would be better.
Participants' comments on this these trainings:

I thought I was already doing a quite good job at teaching about homosexuality because I am very sensitive to kids excluding each other. Now I realize that being friendly and sensitive is not be enough because there are social norms at work that I need to discuss in class. Actually, I am glad our principal took part in the training because we cannot tackle this issue with single teaching sessions. ( a female teacher and care coordinator at an International school in Amsterdam, 2013)

Storytelling & peer educator training

In Europe, peer-educators from LGBT organizations go to schools to tell their coming-out story and engage in a dialogue on discrimination. Storytelling as a method also is becoming more popular in other continents, although the focus on telling coming-out stories is often skipped in non-Western countries. These training are for both LGBT and heterosexual educators who enter school for short sessions.
The training deals both with the content of such education (not only how to combat homophobia and transphobia, but also how to put this is the context of heteronormativity) and the didactic aspects of peer-education (how to tell your story effectively, which methods work best to engage in dialogue, how do you connect to different audiences). Research on volunteer educators shows that many educators enjoy telling their story and think that positive responses from students and a lively discussion is an effective session - which is not always the case. Furthermore, in more "difficult" groups, volunteer educators often find they lack adequate facilitation skills, especially when they are confronted with fierce and emotional prejudice. Our trainings focus on how to have real impact on students future behavior by analyzing where negative emotions and attitudes come from and how educators can deal with them. We offer both factual analysis, self-reflection, strategic session planning and skill training in order to make sessions more effective.
Participants' comments on this these trainings:

This training was really fun to do because it was packed with interactive exercises and games that I can also use in class. (a male participant in an international summer school for peer-educators, France, 2010)
I enjoyed this training, but it was also confronting for me. Especially the role-play were we were challenged to answer prejudiced questions and I realized I actually agreed with the question. I did not know how to respond to: "Why are lesbians always behaving like men? I hate that!" I am lesbian but I do not look but at all and I actually feel irritated by lesbian who look like that. But I don't want to drag them down by agreeing with a clearly hateful student like that. It make me realize I also have to learn to deal with some diversity issues as well... This training helped me to make a step in this. (a female participant in a local peer-education group training, Germany, 2009)
Yes, we talk a lot about our situation. And we feel very powerless in the face of censorship laws and increasing traditionalism and violence. We considered the authorities and most of the churches as enemies even when we are part of the church and the State. But this training has helped us to reflect on our situation and recognize how our internal stories as victims make us behave as victims. This de-empowers us and makes a dialogue in church difficult. We started to redevelop our testimonials and storytelling into more strategic tools of change. (a male participant in an international training on using storytelling for empowerment and advocacy in churches in Eastern Europe, Kiev, 2013)
I first was skeptic about the introduction of this "Western" storytelling in an Asian country. We don't need coming-out, everybody knows I am Waria (transgender) and I am very visible. The problem is that the public despises Waria and our education needs to correct that. The it turned out that GALE is not at all focusing on coming-out as a main emancipation strategy and we seriously looked at how we could develop a unique way of storytelling in Indonesia. A large part of the training was about how to engage in a dialogue with students. This is difficult in Asia. We are not used to discuss issues on which we might disagree, we rather keep silent. This is also what schools teach: keep silent. But I do realize now that our sessions will not be effective enough when we will just do speeches. So we develop some typical Indonesian conversation techniques to start discussing this. (a transgender participant in an national training to develop the first peer-education program in Indonesia, 2013)

Interested?

If you are interested in having a tailored training for your organization, please contact us at info@lgbt-education.info and express your needs. Be aware the GALE Foundation does not have a budget to offer these trainings for free. So you have to reserve own budget or we need to engage in a joint application to get funding.