Up and running!
by Chris Lawton, August 2020
“Silk Road provides a valuable course that could be a life saver for so many around the world” – Ana Caroline de Lima @antropologiavisual, Brazil
We’re up and running! When we were early testing in January we predicted that it would be at least a year before we got an actual, real, customer. We planned to use this time to test some more and work out what kind of thing worked, what didn’t, what people would pay for our training and whether they’d pay at all. We even wondered if it might take up to three years for buyers to get used to the idea that technology really could deliver quality security and first aid training. But we were wrong. We’ve had some amazing endorsements, like the one above from Ana, a journalist and documentary photographer based in Brazil, and this has encouraged us to offer our courses while we continue with our development.
In the past few months we’ve provided our courses to the Orhan Dzhemal Media Security Academy which were translated into Russian. This brilliant initiative is open to professional and citizen journalists, freelancers, bloggers and online activists who use Russian as one of their working languages. I love this because it is designed for an under served community (on the use of languages, I should let you know that we can provide subtitled content in almost any language typically within 48 – 72 hours of your request).
We’ve also provided online hostile environment training and live events for Sveriges Radio and for the ACOS Alliance, who awarded 54 bursaries to freelance journalists who have been covering civil unrest in the US, Brazil and Bangladesh and for whom we created a purpose built course. Our training helped ACOS to continue their important work strengthening the safety skills and knowledge of freelance journalists who wouldn’t normally have access to this kind of training.
We were also really pleased to provide a refresher hostile environment and first aid course online to the UK government as they sought to solve the question of how to provide life saving training for their personnel working overseas. We’ve delivered the solution to them and look forward to building this relationship in the future.
One of the best things for me about the past few months has been seeing the rise towards the mainstream of new and disruptive ideas. The discover.film VR Film Fest was the first of its kind. It was a film festival held entirely in VR for one day this month. We were delighted to partner with discover.film to sponsor and support this event. We are committed to the possibilities this technology can offer in our training and it was an amazing, crazy evening finding out where the creative community is already taking it!
- Links:
– Check out our Hostile Environment Training courses
– Email for information about our bespoke immersive training
– See our Travel Safety & First Aid courses