We recently passed the milestone of 2,000 course attendees across THRE’s training offer.
Aer, THRE’s project manager, has written about the impact the first course we created – The Basics has had, and why it is still central to what we do.
When THRE began we were starting from scratch as a completely new project – pretty much a blank piece of paper on which to build something new. One of the first things we did was to go out to the sector to talk to them about human rights and equalities, where they were, what they currently did, and most importantly for us where they wanted to be and what support they would like to get there.
One of the clearest messages we got back was that organisations did see human rights and equalities as important and wanted to do more, but for many of them the place they were starting from was a recognition that the level of understanding within their organisation was often low, but that the existing training and support on offer often started at a level above the one they needed. There was a need for something that covered the basics on which they could then build.
The realisation that this foundation was missing gave us our place to start, and we set to work to create A Human Rights and Equalities First Approach – The Basics.
The Basics is now a cornerstone of our offer, it is our most taken course with over 450 people having attended it in one of the variety of ways we make the course available, and it makes up nearly a quarter of all the training we have delivered since it launched as our first course in September 2022.
The course is designed to help people learn the fundamentals, what Human Rights and Equalities are, what the key principles of them are and why they matter, along with starting to think about how they can apply them in their work.
It is a course created specifically to help people get a feeling of what it is like to be a person of difference moving through the world we currently live in. Rather than coming out with a tick list of facts our hope is that after taking the Basics people understand on a personal, and on a human level, why human rights and equalities are important and why building them into how we think and work makes a difference.
And the feedback we have received has consistently shown that the course is doing this, people tell us of the impact it has had on them as individuals and on how they now understand human rights and equalities and what they are going to do to make change happen.
This is backed up by the numbers, 88% rate the course content “extremely useful” or “very useful”, 96% reported a better understanding of human rights and equalities and 96% feel what they have learnt will help them to better embed human rights and equalities into their work.
Recognising the value of the course, since it launched we have added different ways to access the course including an option spread over two half-days and the creation of a high-quality e-learning version to make the course accessible to a much wider number of people and organisations than we would be able to reach solely through our original one day zoom training format alone.
The Basics will continue to be central to our offer, at THRE we believe creating a solid foundation of understanding and empathy within an organisation, so people see the reasons, but also feel why human rights and equalities are important is essential to being able to build a culture where human rights and equalities are at the heart of who and what an organisation is, and to allow change to truly happen.
