This training will be facilitated by Quabbin Mediation:

Training Active Bystanders 2-hour Workshop

Creating Safety in Contentious TimesIf you are a bystander witnessing a harmful situation, you have a choice to make. Do you do something? What do you do?Training Active Bystanders (TAB) helps participants recognize when they are bystanders, analyze situations, and evaluate the consequences for everyone involved. TAB heightens bystanders’ power. It teaches how bystanders can interrupt harm doing and generate positive actions by others. Active bystandership does not mean aggression against the harm doer. It means taking responsible action to help people in need instead of remaining passive and becoming complicit. Bystanders gain the competencies they need if they decide to take action when they witness something they feel is unfair, or wrong, or troubling.

Pluralism Project Summary:

On a Saturday morning in June, approximately 30 people gathered at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Forest Hills, Boston to attend a bystander intervention training hosted by GBIO and facilitated by Quabbin Mediation. Suzan El-Rayess of GBIO and the ISBCC opened the workshop by explaining how it emerged out of the ISBCC’s “Out of Many, One” event in December 2016, where attendees had asked to learn how to be “upstanders.” The day’s training sought to instruct people in how to transition from passive to active bystandership. The program began by emphasizing how everyone has been a target and a harm-doer, as well as an active and passive bystander. Facilitators instructed participants in what inhibits and promotes active bystandership while underscoring that active bystandership is about standing with the target, rather than targeting the harm-doer. Particular attention was given to learning how to gather allies and develop one’s moral courage.

This summary was written by a Pluralism Project staff member who attended the event.