The Local Changemakers Course

Watch this film to discover the course!

Illustration of a religiously and ethnically diverse group of people sitting in a circle on the floor. Illustrator: Toby Newsome.

Course type

A complete curriculum for grassroots level awareness raising & mobilisation. A ready-made set of course materials for you to download and run activities in your community.

Target audience

Grassroots level: interfaith groups, faith communities, youth groups, women’s groups, school groups. No previous knowledge required.

Time: Nine 2-hour face to face workshops

Use the full 18 hour curriculum or pick and choose your favourite topics and exercises to integrate into existing activities.

What is the course?

The Local Changemakers Course is a series of nine face-to-face workshops, designed to enable groups of adults and young people to learn about, value and promote freedom of religion or belief (FORB) for all in their communities.
A complete curriculum of course materials is available and is free for any person or organisation to download and use in any way they find helpful.

Why run the course?

Many people are worried about violations of freedom of religion and about interfaith tensions in their community but are unsure of how to make a difference.

The Local Changemakers Course helps local communities to understand and value freedom of religion or belief for all and to discover tactics they can use to make a difference.

The course is designed for ordinary people – including those who consider human rights to be an irrelevance or a foreign imposition. The course brings together interfaith dialogue, peacebuilding and rights-based approaches, using a participant centered methodology with a focus on storytelling, visual communication and interactive exercises drawing upon participants’ life experiences.

The course materials are easy to adapt to any context and have been successfully tested by local facilitators with interfaith participant groups in Nigeria, Tanzania, Jordan, India and Sweden for example.

In some contexts it is dangerous to talk about human rights directly – although the course talk about rights it also includes tools and exercises that can help you talk about freedom of religion or belief without mentioning human rights – notably the storytale ‘The songs of the flute and the drum‘.

Click here to access
all course materials!

Find the course materials

This course is available in 8 languages. How about your language?

All language versions.

The best thing about the course was how engaging and relevant to people’s concerns it was, at the same time as being simple to run and lots of fun.

Hidaya Dude

Zanzibar Interfaith Centre, Tanzania

Course aims

To help us recognise and appreciate diversity within and between communities.
To help us understand and appreciate human rights, including the right to freedom of religion or belief.
To identify problems for freedom of religion or belief in our communities.
To find ways to tackle those problems together.

Who is the course designed for?

The Local Changemakers’ Course is designed for people at the grassroots level – people who are concerned about problems related to freedom of religion or belief in their community and society, and want to find ways to make a difference. The course requires no previous knowledge, experience or even acceptance of human rights from participants. What is needed is an open mind, an interest in helping to build communities characterised by peaceful co-existence and equality, and a willingness to engage in an interactive process of mutual learning and reflection. It can be used with participants with limited literacy, but is also a great tool for use with university educated groups and local religious leaderships.

The course is designed for groups of 12-24 people but can be adapted for larger or smaller groups.

Who can facilitate the course?

The Local Changemakers Course is interactive – including group exercises, games, stories, discussions and role plays as well as presentations. Anyone with some experience of leading interactive learning processes with adults and young people can lead it. What the facilitator needs most is sensitivity to the context – the ability to judge if some issues are too sensitive or dangerous to discuss and to adapt the process accordingly, as well as the ability to handle group dynamics when sensitivities or tensions arise.

You do not need to be experienced in or knowledgeable about human rights or freedom of religion or belief to facilitate the course. The facilitator’s guide and accompanying resources provide detailed guidance on how to run each session as well as tips for facilitation. All the information you need is provided, including scripts and PowerPoints for presentations about the issues. The facilitator’s role is not to be an expert, but to guide participants through a process of mutual learning.

Course materials

The course materials consist of a facilitators guide and accompanying materials for each session such as PowerPoints, handouts, game cards, posters and presentation scripts.

Find all course materials here.

Course overview

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

This session focuses on developing participants’ knowledge of their human rights and positive attitudes towards human rights. By the end of the session participants will:
- be able to list at least six human rights that are important for their daily lives and name at least one right that is violated in their community.
- express that human rights are important and relevant to their daily lives and that everyone can play a role in building a society where human rights are respected and protected.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

This session focuses on developing participants’ knowledge and appreciation of the value of the human right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief. By the end of the session participants will be able to:
- explain the heart of FORB: the right to have, choose/change and practice your religion or beliefs without discrimination, coercion or violence.
- explain how FORB relates to their daily lives.
- explain limitations to the right in a basic way, that FORB can never be used as an excuse for harming other people.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

This session focuses on developing positive attitudes towards the ‘other’ and the ability to recognise privilege and disadvantage. By the end of the session participants will:
- recognise that religious identity is only one part of their identity and that they have identities and life experiences that are shared across religious divides
- recognise that different aspects of our identity can lead to privilege or disadvantage, and that some people face multiple disadvantages or multiple privileges as a result
- express solidarity with people who are disadvantaged because of an aspect of their identity, and the need for people to come together across divides to make change happen.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

This session focuses on building knowledge regarding different types of FORB violations and the situation for FORB internationally, and on strengthening skills in recognising violations. By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
- describe different types of FORB violation
- identify typical FORB violations in concrete situations
- acknowledge that people of all faiths and none are affected by FORB
  violations and empathise with their suffering.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

This session focuses on building skills in context analysis. By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
- describe FORB related problems/violations faced by different people and groups in their community
- identify how FORB violations affect women and girls in the community differently from men and boys
- empathise with people of other communities who are affected by FORB violations.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

These sessions focus on developing knowledge regarding tactics for the promotion of human rights. By the end of sessions 6 and 7 participants will:
- be able to give a simple explanation of the four different categories of tactics that can be used to promote human rights and give examples of actions for each type
- express a desire to promote human rights in their community
- have jointly identified at least five actions that they could take as individuals, and five actions that groups/organisations they are involved in could take, to promote FORB in their community.
These sessions focus on developing action planning skills. By the end of sessions 8 and 9 participants will be able to:
- develop simple action plans for promoting FORB in the community
- name concrete actions that they personally can take to promote FORB
  and other rights
- express commitment to taking action to promote FORB and other rights.
Where relevant, participants will:
- implement their action plans after the training.

We would love to hear your experiences of using the
course materials to make change in your community.

Tell us your story!

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