As Their Course Ends, Baytna Trainees Look Forward to Civil Work

October 19, 2022 - “The internet is off. No, it is back again. Can you hear me?"

This is how some recent training started for Baytna Outline's participants, especially in Lebanon, with electricity cuts sometimes interfering with our timings, but never putting a dent in everyone’s enthusiasm for starting their final course of the year.

The course was designed to include many vital subjects that would be important for participants’ current and future work, starting with safety, security, and risk management, then going through the role of civil society, and ending with social cohesion and the best ways of enhancing it.

Being online, our trainers had to be creative in delivering the information to the trainees. Trainer Haneen Ali, for instance, started the training by asking questions about the trainees' idea of social cohesion and how it would reflect the strength or weaknesses of any society, before explaining the social cohesion in theory and in reality and showing examples of the main factors from a Syrian perspective.

Alia, one of the trainees, thought that "social cohesion would appear in social relationships and in the strength of bonds between groups and individuals." For Sami, "social cohesion is the responsibility of civil and governmental institutions taking care of the society members' wellbeing."

In trainer Obada Al-Abdallah's workshop about safety, security, and risk management, trainees were divided into groups and given practical activities and challenges to solve. "They improved their understanding of risk assessment, emergency response to incidents, and strengthening the security and safety sector to make the right decisions while doing their work," said Al-Alabdallah.

"I had no idea we should do a periodical assessment for all potential risks we could face in our work, even when things seem normal and no incidents occur. Our constructive activities really helped us to know how to prepare, to be ready to respond rapidly," commented Ali during the workshop.

For an entirely different perspective, trainer Samer Almosfi took the trainees on a historic journey to explore the sense of civil society and its role in rising up with the community. Almosfi adopted an interactive, participatory method, using brainstorming in discussion and working in groups to give participants a deeper understanding of the nature of civil society and the rolel of civil work organizations.

Many participants were interested in issues relating to the obstacles civil society organizations face in Lebanon and Turkey. Specifically, they talked about the legal difficulties associated with the lack of licenses for civil work organizations, the inability to obtain work permits, no permission to implement activities and projects, and the lack of a welcoming environment, especially for women-related projects. For them, the harmful competition between civil society organizations in countries of asylum was another disturbing factor, to which they hoped there would be solutions.

As the series of trainings came to an end for this group of participants, Almosfi stressed that "it is important and necessary to work on expanding the civil workspace, by empowering youth and giving them the tools they need for their work, to initiate meetings that transfer expertise between their groups, and to support their community participation by inviting them to all events related to their work."