White Dove Project

We use participatory theatre workshops, delivered in-person and virtually, to build the soft skills and mental well-being of migrant, refugee and displaced populations with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on women and young girls. We train refugee women to lead the workshops as our model for scale.

Migrants and refugees typically experience trauma, social exclusion and the need to adapt to their new surroundings.  Additionally, they have challenges accessing traditional job markets, suffer from discrimination, bureaucracy and difficulties in transferring their qualifications from their home country to the demands of their host countries.  Individuals highly educated in their home countries are reduced to manual labour or relying on unemployment benefit and are therefore unable to contribute to their new communities, earn a living or regain their sense of identity and self-esteem

Hua Dan (www.hua-dan.org) is a China-based social enterprise that uses participatory theatre as a tool for personal and social transformation.  It is the first project of the Scheherazade Initiatives and has already trained 10 migrant workers who have worked with over 30,000 migrant women and children across the country.  We have recently published a UBS-funded action research report that documents the work of Hua Dan.  The report proves that participatory theatre has an impact on improved family relationships, enhanced academic attainment, the development of soft skills and a greater sense of self-esteem and potential.

In the next 3 years, 24,000 migrant and refugee youth will be empowered with life and work skills necessary to lead creative, collaborative and conflict-free lives in the 21st century.

Theatre workshops will be deployed through a combination of in-person workshops through partner organisations and through an online learning application that offers remote learning, provides a platform for monitoring and evaluation and an internal platform for the training of our refugee facilitators.  

Attendance at workshops - 24, 455 migrant and refugee youth attend workshops

Pre- and post-evaluation questionnaires; case studies; feedback loop through app - Migrant and refugee youth develop life and work skills for 21st century.

Successful development of app and continued use of app for online learning modules, peer education, leadership training and M and E - Development of an application to deliver theatre workshops to hard-to-reach populations, as well as follow-up and M and E for live workshops, creating exponential scale for our work beyond the initial 24,455 beneficiaries

There is currently no interactive theatre app and certainly none that use interactive theatre as a tool for personal and social transformation.  Our application would build on our live workshops to enable participants to create fictional characters, worlds and narratives that act as a proxy to work out problems faced in real life and collaborate and exchange with others to bring solutions to those challenges.  The app would integrate with real-world challenges that transform participants lives, underpinned with a monitoring and evaluation feedback loop, and complemented with peer education and leadership training modules.

Theatre workshops are central to human experience – telling stories, sharing thoughts, feelings, emotions; collaborating with others; role-playing solutions to challenges; ‘rehearsal for real life’ that places action, not passive consumption, at the heart of the human experience.  Our ‘technology’ has been the theatre workshop in its small-scale live form.  The creation of character, story, theme is entirely driven by the participants themselves.  Empowerment is key to our process as we believe that individuals know best what they need. Our vision of the new technological applications of our work is the same. 

Our solution will be deployed by community-based organisations, academic institutions and other non-profits in the countries where we work, as well as through online learning applications. The workshops will all be lead by our refugee facilitators and student ‘pioneers’ and will be free.  Our model is based on the empowerment of migrants and refugees in their communities as leaders and training for this leadership is a core element of scale and our app will include a way for training and peer-education of our facilitators that could potentially be offered fee-for-service or through a license.

We run a hybrid model, that receives donations from foundations and corporate social responsibility departments for our projects with refugees in the community; and a for-profit corporate training arm that trains refugees to lead workshops that enable employees in MNCs to understand the challenges and opportunities of globalisation.  Profits from this support our community work.

Now with the creation and development of an app, we are looking at a licensing arrangement for the training of trainer tools, to support the free access to the online workshops for refugees.

Our biggest risk is not being able to secure sufficient start-up funds to retain our skilled team to be able to work full-time on the project.

https://www.facebook.com/whitedoveproject/

http://www.carolinewatson.org/

I wish to use Solve to develop technology partnerships to push the boundaries of the intersection between the arts and technology.  To also help with start-up funds to employ my core-team on a full-time basis as this is a definite barrier to fast scaling.  And to develop the networks to build a sustainable business model for both the corporate training and the online learning, through a fee-for-service, licensing model or some kind of franchise system.

Current partners include UBS Optimus, Diageo, Young Global Leaders and Global Shapers of the World Economic Forum; schools and community centres in China, Germany, France, Jordan and the US.

We do not believe we have any direct competitors as we understand we are innovators in this field.