Mekong Cultural Hub

The training is for people work with communities or groups, even individuals in art and social action, or they might encounter situations where people they are engaging with (e.g. colleagues, participants, community collaborators) are being affected by emotions and stressful situations, and they have a role and responsibility to support them. It does not matter whether you do this work independently or within an organisation.

The purpose of the training is to give you skills to support other people. Naturally in the process you will also learn more about yourself, how to support yourself and how to seek support when you need it.

 In this training program, we particularly look at applicants who are in the position of needing to support others, including the communities they work with, their colleagues or other people involved.  Therefore, if they can learn the skills, they can apply this in their work to support others when there’s a need.  The skills are for everyone and it can also help us to know ourselves, to support ourselves and find the support we need when we’re going through challenging times of crisis.

We will be using the arts and creativity throughout the course to enable your expression, self-awareness and reflection.

The participants will be required to journal their learnings, thoughts, reflection or anything that comes to them between the weekly workshops.  You can use whatever you have at hand, a notebook you’d like to use, any pens, or any way you’d like to express yourself in your journal.

Creative journaling is a very powerful medium. It can serve as a safe practice for each participant to use to support their learning.   It’s a tool for you to take forward as a way to continue to reflect and develop from your own experiences and from each other.

You don’t need to have prior experience in art and creativity for this. Carrie will guide you through the process, and you can use any creative method you feel is more inspiring to you.

Please make sure to read the Open Call Document to make sure you meet the eligibility criteria and to ensure you can commit to attend all sessions listed in the document.  In the application form, your answers will help us to understand why you want to join and why now is a good time.  We do not care if the writing is perfect; we do want to hear your real voice.

The whole way we’re going to do this training is very heart centered. We’re not training and learning about intellectual information. The trainer is not going to give you a long presentation with loads of facts. There will be some facts for you to learn but it’s very much in response to our hearts because we’re dealing with the landscape of emotions. Just having that awareness when you are considering applying.  If you are able to come with an open heart and ready to learn, that’s the preparation.

You can engage in the training at the level that you feel comfortable with.  There’s never any pressure to talk about anything traumatic. When there’s an opportunity to share your experience, you can choose if you feel fine to share or not. The safe space will be created by the trainer together with the peers in the group.

 The on-boarding includes asking all participants to fill in a questionnaire to let the trainer understand each one’s situation, for example if there is anything the trainer should be aware of so she could support each participant better.  Then there will be a one-to-one session before the training (weekly workshops) starts.  That is the time and space where you can also support the trainer by helping her to understand your situation or anything actually you are facing.

With limited resources and mission of MCH, this training program is designed for people whose work is at the intersection of arts/culture and society.   This can include people whose main professional practice is arts/ culture or creativity and work directly on social change or engaging with social, environmental and development issues. It can also include people whose main professional practice is social work or development or human rights, for whom working with arts and creativity and/or collaborating with artists is a core part of the work they do.  If you work on social issues but don’t actively work with the arts or with artists then we would not consider your work to be at the intersection of arts/ culture and society.  If you feel not sure, please do not hesitate to contact us. Or you can describe your experiences working in/with arts and society in the application form.