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Fascilitating Your Own Group
This is an invitation to groups or individuals to run a learning group as part of Scottish Histories of Resistance. We have a strong preference that groups are run as part of/in collaboration with existing local heritage projects, local community projects or existing political organising groups. This is because we want to enhance existing community resources and networks, rather than begin new things and we want people to be able to easily implement the learning of this project.
The principles we want to prioritise when running a group are; welcoming, creative, open to all learning styles, a space to challenge and be challenged, a space to connect and build relationships, a space where we try to enact what we learn.
These principles are always work in progress, and we know that there will be challenges. That is why we have the structure of the ‘Learning Spaces’ working group, which is a place to learn together how to enact these principles, hold each other to them and discuss issues or solutions we have found.
Some examples of format which worked well in previous learning groups are:
To always have food & hot drinks (you can ask folks to bring something to share)
To run the event in a consistent time, date and place e.g. 1st Sunday of each month
To watch, read or listen to resources together in the space, rather than expecting people to do things in advance
To invite live speakers, especially people who know local history which relates to the topic
To not make sessions longer than 2-3 hours
Commitments:
Be a named group, with contact and joining information, which people can access through our website. If your group is for a specific identity group, project or is otherwise closed in some way, please make this clear.
Hold at least one monthly learning session
Have at least one person who is a point of contact for the ‘Learning Space’ working group, which will meet online every 3 months
Follow the curriculum/using the resources collected and created by SHoR, give feedback on the resources and how they supported learning in your context
Create and collect local information on the topics in the SHoR curriculum,and session plans detailing how to hold learning spaces on these topics. Share it with the wider community so it can be used by other learners
Encourage participants to become ‘members’ of SHoR, this way they have independent access to our online learning resources, and have actively engaged with the question of whether they are able to support the project on a monthly basis
Opportunities:
Use the resources in whatever way feels appropriate to your group or community
Use the suggested session plans for each topic, or create your own
Run as many monthly sessions as you want
Use the curriculum to support local research, specific projects or specific actions
Charging for attending groups:
It is an important principle of SHoR that we do not put more financial barriers between people and their history/culture. However we understand that groups need some money in order to hire venues etc, and that some people may be unable to do the work of running a local group without being paid. It is okay to cover costs including your time at £20 per hour for the work of running a group, we ask that people be charged on a sliding scale and that nobody is turned away for lack of funds.
In general this project has limited access to funding and is run by volunteers (as in no spare capacity for fundraising or administering funding applications). If people in your group/community have access to financial resources, and can contribute more than it costs to cover expenses then please donate this to the main project so it can be used to subsidise lower income groups, and the general creation of learning resources.
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