[2nd Balkans report] We gathered Balkan youth leaders in Bologna, Italy for a training in leadership and group facilitation. What we got was a war of words, which was exactly what the group needed.Our second Balkans training report

By George Lakey

November01

The workshop goals didn't include a confrontation, but facilitators noted the gathering storm during the Training of Trainers event and decided to precipitate the conflict.

After all, the group included Serbs, Albanian Kosovars, and Bosnians, plus Romanians and other concerned Europeans -- 22 in all. A storm could be avoided by pretence or suppression, but Training for Change's style is influenced by the Gandhian emphasis on truth.

We were also aware of the severe turbulence in the global field at the moment. Not only are mass graves still being found in the Balkans, where atrocities were committed by all sides, but the dogs of war are unleashed yet again in Afghanistan.

It was Saturday evening in the weekend workshop when co-facilitators Claudia Horwitz, Todd Waller, and I invited participants to "fight it out," borrowing from psychologist Arnold Mindell a methodology which supports strong emotional expression (along with the ground rule "No hitting"!).

Participants worked hard; nearly all were outside their comfort zone. As the conflict raged, it moved from phase to phase. (Mindell believes that conflict itself is natural ; the danger comes when conflicts get stuck, because a stuck or suppressed conflict invites terrorism. If only global elites could take that to heart!)

The groups didn't get stuck, thanks to participants with heart and some facilitator interventions.

Suddenly, the turbulence was over; the storm blew itself out. Participants reflected on the layers of meaning: political, moral, the dynamics of conflict, their own individual behavior in the conflict.

At last the tired and relieved group left the room to eat, party, and bond further. They'd found a new level of authenticity with each other, despite the horrors of what their peoples had done. It gives hope.

Building training capacity for the Balkans

A majority of the group had been to train-the-trainer workshops before, but these had largely been using top-down, teacher-centered/curriculum-centered models. Most of the young people were strongly challenged therefore, by the model TFC is evolving, which draws from popular education and experiential methods of humanistic psychology as well as ten years of its own innovation. The TFC model challenges not only because it is different, but also because it assumes deep respect for the wisdom of workshop participants. This attitude of respect we recommend to aspiring trainers can be hard for them to adopt; go-getting young people may be coming from hometown atmospheres thick with fear and despair.

Claudia and I had met some of the participants in Vukovar, Croatia, in the June01 South Eastern Europe Youth Organizing Institute. Some in Vukovar were especially selected to come to this follow-up training of trainers at the University of Bologna, Italy, by the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies' Center for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development.

The third step for this group will be taken this winter in Sarajevo, and then those who have shown most ability will be invited to become apprentice trainers next July in Romania for a new cohort of 40 young Balkan leaders. Claudia and I will return to the region to co-facilitate the new cohort.

Most of the Vukovar grads (and next summer's Romanian grads) are expected to put their new organizing skills to work in building grassroots movements for change, for example women's issues, ecology action, human rights. The project is designed at each phase, however, to invite some of the young adults to learn training skills, to eliminate the need for outsiders to play a large training role.

Several of the aspiring trainers hope to come to the June02 Super-T at TFC in Philadelphia to become further prepared, as have trainers from Russia and Thailand where experiential nonviolence training is now established. (For reports on a decade of training in Russia and Thailand, ask the TFC office. Also see our Vukovar report with photos.)

Claudia Horwitz is director and founder of Stone Circles, based in Durham, N.C., and author of A Stone's Throw: Living the Act of Faith (Viking). Todd Waller is director of the Center for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development, a project of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Bologna, Italy.

Copyright ©01 Training for Change

• Printer-friendly version
• Send to friend
• PDF version