On 20 February 2020 we held the first STAR E workshop day with representatives of 22 NGOs working in the field of youth, volunteering and political education in the Global Village in Berlin Neukölln. The conference started with a culinary reception, which gave possibilities to meet and talk to other participants. After a short introduction to the project STAR E and the experience made since August 2017, we had two lectures by guest speakers. They reported on their experience in working with groups with a high level of diversity and sensitizing participants about racism in a white dominated environment. This triggered many questions and an intense discussion.
After a coffee break which was also used to continue the dialogue at personal level, two experts presented the first handbook “Standing Together Against Racism – A Training Handbook-” by actively involving the attendees in doing the method “Don’t act like me” which encourages participants to do a self- and then group reflection about racist incidents they have experienced or witnessed in their life. After this reflection experience and good discussions in the groups we went into the final round of exchange with the speakers in the plenary. A very positive feedback was given regarding the methodology of this workshop as it contained both a theoretical input, a practice exercise and enough room for discussions and questions. As one participant put it in the final evaluation round: I felt warmly invited to participate and taken along the programme!
The positive experience will be continued – the second workshop day will take place tomorrow on March 12! We will have a panel discussion and present the second publication “Managing Organisational Change – Tools and methods to become a diversity-sensitive NGO”. Around 25 representatives of around 20 organisations (mainly from Berlin) have registered to this event. We look forward to an interesting exchange and dicussion!