I have participated in many pieces of training and workshops in my ten-year career but this training was unique. I am committing that I will surely keep the learning outcome of this training in my mind and will cascade it among the youth in my community’’, said Banani Dasgupta Basanty, a senior staff member of Rupantar.
Active Citizens is a social leadership training programme organised by the British Council. This programme aims to promote intercultural dialogue and social development. This is the seventh year of the programme in Bangladesh and the Active Citizens team has had 33 new facilitators in the first week of August 2016. The facilitator training was arranged by the British Council. It was held in Dhaka from 1 to 5 August 2016.
The facilitator training is a regular programme of Active Citizens. Every year, through this training, the British Council works to enrich and grow the Active Citizens facilitators’ pool with new members. Through this training, new members who have been added to the team will ensure 150 ‘Active Citizens Youth Leadership Training’ who will, in turn, create 6000 Active Citizens Youth Leaders.
Active Citizens have nine implementing partners who are civil society organisations. These implementing partner organisations nominate participants for the programme. This year, the core facilitator team ensured that the participants receive a full version of contextualised and translated training toolkit. The team also incorporated into the training sessions, experiences from the communities and suggestions from other facilitators. This was recognised as one of the successes of Active Citizens in Bangladesh.
The master facilitators demonstrated the plenary sessions which helped the participants to have a holistic idea of the Active Citizens learning journey. Besides this, a few sessions were also designed to build capacity on the facilitation skills and techniques. The training was a combination of the learning part and the activity part. The activity part was scheduled on the second day of the training where participants were divided into small groups and each participant had to demonstrate their knowledge and skills by running sessions in front of his/her team members and the team leaders.
“I have participated in many pieces of training and workshops in my ten-year career but this training was unique. I am committing that I will surely keep the learning outcome of this training in my mind and will cascade it among the youth in my community’’, said Banani Dasgupta Basanty, a senior staff member of Rupantar. Like Banani, some experienced participants joined the training along with young volunteers who were Active Citizens themselves and have been contributing to create positive change in society through their brilliant Social Actions Projects (SAPs).
