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| Dianne Campbell and Jo Lemay at graduation. |
In an exciting collaboration this past February, Literacy Lives Certificate Program in Community Capacity Building adopted the AIDS Vancouver Educate to Empower training into its program.
Literacy Lives Community Capacity Building Certificate Program, a 6-month pilot program run by Community Education Program at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre, provided learners with an opportunity to acquire the skills needed to create, set into motion, and evaluate their own community capacity building projects. At the same time, the program seeks to foster an increased awareness about HIV and the health determinants or conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.
AIDS Vancouver’s Educate to Empower: Training of Trainers Program is a community-based training curriculum designed to build capacity and foster new knowledge around AIDS education, at both the individual and community level. As Tasha Riley, co-author and editor of the training curriculum explained at the program’s launch this past December, “We train people so they can train others to lead the workshops in a way that would be beneficial for their communities.” Currently, Educate to Empower offers eight workshops that can either stand alone as individual workshops or flow together as a consecutive training series. These 2 to 4 hour workshops cover topics highlighting both the facts and complexities behind the disease.
Jo Lemay, Curriculum Developer and Lead Instructor with Literacy Lives, says that Literacy Lives and Educate to Empower are cut from a similar cloth in that they both encourage participants to share their knowledge and skills with others in their communities. It equally made sense to draw on the Educate to Empower training, Jo explains, since Literacy Lives is a program grounded in collaborating with other organizations. Literacy Lives also aims to open up opportunities for its learners and, for this reason, Jo sees great value in the certificate issued by AIDS Vancouver to those who complete the training.
At the outset of the training, Literacy Lives learners each received a binder containing the complete Educate to Empower curriculum. Over the course of four weeks, learners developed various skills around how to facilitate a number of different workshops within the Educate to Empower curriculum. Specifically, learners discussed how to create spaces in which workshop participants can bring together basic knowledge related to HIV/AIDS with their own experience and understandings.In the ‘Negotiating Sexual Relationships’ workshop, learners explored the notion of communication in the context of sexual relationships as well as the various challenges one may face when negotiating safer sex. In the ‘Gender and HIV’ workshop, learners discussed how definitions and expectations around gender influence our lives, both in terms of gendered privilege and gendered inequalities as well as the impact this can have upon HIV transmission. The training closed with an activity where learners worked together to create ‘Body Maps' to demonstrate how HIV and HIV-related stigma and discrimination affect individuals and communities.
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| One of the 'Body Maps' created during the training. |
Tasha Riley, who facilitated the training along with four volunteer facilitators, shared the following reflection: “I left each workshop feeling motivated by the level of dedication, commitment and passion the learners in the Literacy Lives program had towards providing high-level projects, programs and workshops for the various communities and organizations with which they worked. I found it refreshing to see how respectful and supportive all of the learners were towards each others’ ideas and opinions around a variety of issues that would be considered sensitive by most.”
For Dianne Campbell, a learner in the Literacy Lives Community Capacity Building Certificate program, the training not only confirmed what she already knew about HIV/AIDS, but it also provided her and other learners with valuable tools in how to share their knowledge with other people in their community. Many Literacy Lives learners, including Dianne, are interested in finding work in HIV education and outreach, so the ability to share their knowledge with others is essential. Jo Lemay confirmed that this training “is an essential piece of the puzzle for many of the learners. They are excited about facilitating education in the community and sharing all that they’ve learned.”
Dianne also shared that she was impressed with the volunteer facilitators who assisted in the training and their openness to share about personal experiences. In terms of future development of the Educate to Empower curriculum, Dianne recommended that participants be responsible for practicing presenting different workshops to one another. In this way, they would gain very real experience in sharing the curriculum with others.
Dianne and 20 fellow learners enrolled in the Literacy Lives Certificate Program in Community Capacity Building graduated from the program on March 19th, 2012.
For more information about Educate to Empower: Training of Trainers Program, or to book a workshop or training session, contact Prevention Education Services, AIDS Vancouver at preventionservices@aidsvancouver.org. For more information about the Literacy Lives Certificate in Community Capacity Building, please visit http://www.sfu.ca/community/literacylives.html
