Face-to-face skills development programmes
Ariel sets up and delivers drama clubs in community venues across Merseyside. These are usually 12-week projects, which create safe spaces where participants can explore a violence prevention or safeguarding theme and how it is impacting their lives.
Our team of Theatre Practitioners have developed a creative, engaging programme of activities designed to develop key skill that promote greater resilience. These include help seeking behaviour, critical thinking, risk assessment and refusal skills. Participants practice these skills in character, including focusing on the role of a bystander and how a bystander can take positive action.
This structured approach can be adapted to explore any violence prevention or safeguarding theme, and the content of each programme is shaped by and responds to the experiences and awareness level of the group. Our 12-week programme builds to a ‘Parental Engagement Workshop’, where the children get to share what they have been discussing and to challenge their parents to jump into the action and practice some of the positive communication strategies that they have been developing.
By listening to the children that we work with, we have developed a series of short animations exploring a range of violence prevention themes. These are used as stimuli for our face-to-face projects and also become the heart of the resources that we develop for schools.
