by Chris Lawton, November 2020
This quarter has seen two great training innovations and some brilliant training delivered all over the world to our growing community and with our partners. Let me tell you about those:
Safety and First Aid Training in Arabic
It has always troubled me that sometimes those who need training the most face the highest barriers to participation. Sometimes this is cost, logistics or availability. Sometimes this is also due to language. To help fix this we partnered with the Skeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom and the ACOS Alliance to build and deliver a security and first aid course in Arabic for use across the Middle East and North Africa. We enrolled our first 50 participants in this course on November 14. It’s already been wonderful to see the focused approach to learning some of the participants have demonstrated so far and the real development of skills and knowledge that they have shown to us in our live events. This has been a real highlight to us and it has been a brilliant experience working with the Skeyes Center. We’d love to see more Arabic speakers completing the training in the future!
Check out our Safety Training courses for Arabic journalists.
Kidnap Training in 360 VR
We have built an immersive 360 degree VR kidnap experience to use as a training aid for those who face this serious and potentially high cost risk. It is visceral and has a great impact, as well as, in the hands of a competent trainer, giving the opportunity to clearly illustrate important training points and learning objectives. Training for this kind of scenario can increase resilience and the ability to survive in the face of this threat, both physically and psychologically, and so can be hugely important, but only if done well. We think we have a solution to democratise this knowledge, and enable safe, consistent practice, but are still in the process of finalising our approach to this. We’d love to speak with anyone who thinks they may be able to help. Contact us here.
A still from our 360 VR kidnap experience. With a headset on it has a highly visceral impact
Training All Over the World
Together with our partners we have been able to deliver training across the planet in the past three months. This has included Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia, Nepal, India, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, the US, the UK, Sri Lanka, Spain, Oman and Turkey. Seriously, wow. Thank you everyone and well done. Let’s keep it going and get as many people trained as we can.