Stronger communities

In September 2020 Protection Approaches launched a ground-breaking Community Builder Training Programme, a London-wide initiative supported by the Mayor of London. In just 5 months this programme has equipped more than 300 Londoners passionate about creating positive change in their communities with the tools, principles, and methodologies they need to tackle injustice, bridge divides and build respectful, resilient communities. 

The workshops are accompanied with bespoke materials containing best practice in community building, community organising and peacebuilding from around the world empowering people who are already deeply involved in their local areas and therefore best placed to deliver community building work with the understanding of how to do that work. After the workshops, participants are tasked with putting their training into action. They initiate new projects, build on existing networks, and integrate what they’ve learnt into their forums, clubs, WhatsApp groups, and other means of community organising or neighbourhood support.  

In December Protection Approaches, Chinese Welfare Trust and Newham Chinese Association launched Confronting COVID-related Hate: Standing with Britain’s Chinese, East & South East Asian Communities, an emergency project that is supporting a nationwide network of British Chinese, East, and Southeast Asian community organisations to respond to the rising levels of hate crimes. The outbreak of COVID-19 saw an increase of anti-Asian hate crimes of 300% in the UK, and recent hate attacks in the UK and US have further increased anxiety. 

Since January our team has delivered ‘responding to hate crime’ training to 190 staff members/volunteers from 24 East and Southeast Asian community groups across England, as well as distributing £70,000 in funding to support these organisation helping them to increase their capacity to respond to hate crime and support their communities at this time of heightened anxiety. 

This programme, written up in the Independent here, has been exceptionally well received by community members. Our evaluation shows that so far, activities undertaken by community groups following the training have reached more than 60,000 community members helping to raise awareness of hate crime, hate crime reporting, and how best to support victims.  

In partnership with the British East and South East Asian Network (besea.n) we have created an active bystander training. These expert-led sessions see participants guided through a series of discussions to explore how they can play a role in tackling identity-based prejudice and violence in their community, school, or place of work. 

Content is tailored to the needs of each group. The training has a minimum time of 2 hours but can also be delivered over a half or full day. Content includes: 

• What it means to be an active bystander or ally: through group discussion the participants explore what being an active bystander means to them
• Standing up for victims: working through a series of scenarios, participants consider and learn what they can do when they encounter prejudice, harassment or violence such as a racist attack in a supermarket or an inappropriate comment from a colleague
• What you can do if you are the victim: participants consider some options they may have if they are the victim of prejudice or violence, and find out where there are support services and resources

All our community programmes are evidence based. 

We undertake, commission, and coordinate research and evaluations to ensure that the programmes we develop and test are supported by evidence of what works and in line with global best parctice from the fields of peace-building, atrocity prevention, countering extremism and violent extremism, and community cohesion building. We also commission national social attitude and public opinion surveys that inform our work and priorities.