Trainers' Manual

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About the Trainers' Manual

The Trainers' Manual was created partially as a companion to Tactical Technology Collective's 'Holistic Security Manual for Human Rights Defenders', and partially to reflect further learnings and best practices identified through Tactical Tech's facilitation of dialogues and engagements between experts and trainers in overall protection, digital security, and psychosocial well-being for human rights defenders between 2013 and 2015.

As such, the manual is divided into three parts:

Part I includes general articles on best practices in facilitation of security and protection trainings for human rights defenders – whatever their main focus may be: digital security, risk analysis, integrated security, etc – which we identified through this process of engagement.

Part II includes stand-alone sessions which are offered 'as-is' without explicit need for pre-requisites, and which can be carried out in the context of any security-related training. They were designed by participants of Tactical Tech's Training of Advanced Security Trainers (or TOAST!) as part of the Holistic Security project in April 2015 and subsequently elaborated upon at a writing sprint in the same month.

Part III includes 11 sessions which are designed to form a sequential 'flow' based on the material from the Holistic Security Manual; they were designed and tested at two four-day 'Introduction to Security' trainings at the Center for Training and Networking in Nonviolent Action “Kurve Wustrow” in 2015. They do not, however, represent the totality of potential sessions which could be based on the manual, and represent rather a first step towards a more comprehensive training programme curriculum.

The structured learning sessions are, in general, organised according to the ADIDS approach (Activity-Discussion-Input-Deepening-Synthesis), an adult learning methodology which became popular among many of the authors through our work on the Level-Up resource for digital security trainers in 2013 and 2014.  We would like to extend our thanks to C5 for her inspiration in this regard.

We hope this manual proves useful to the community of facilitators and trainers who are responsible for processes of exploration and skill-building in well-being, security and protection of human rights defenders. We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to human rights defenders and our colleagues from numerous organisations who have lent their brains, hands and hearts to this process.