What does AVP-WA do?
AVP offers workshops based on experiences that help us to become more aware of the violence in our lives and how we can find creative, rather than destructive, ways of resolving conflicts.
Who are the people in AVP-WA?
We are ordinary people from all walks of life who volunteer our time and energy to help rid our communities of violence. We are not required to be counsellors, psychologists, or therapists. We are trained to facilitate the workshops that AVP offers.
What is the purpose of AVP and what do you hope to achieve?
The purpose of AVP is to empower people to transform violence into non-violence in their families and in their communities.
How do you do it? What is a workshop like?
Each session in a workshop is based round a particular theme and is a sequence of activities of different kinds:
Gathering: An exercise in which each participant has the chance to speak briefly on a topic and has the effect of gathering the group together at the start of a session
Exercise: An activity, discussion or brainstorm on the theme of the session.
Light and lively: This is a game, usually with a lot of movement and laughter, which helps to balance the deeper parts of the workshop.
What is the effectiveness of the project/workshops? How is it evaluated?
Every session in the workshop ends with a detailed evaluation by the group of every activity in the session. At the end of the entire workshop, each participant is asked to write a comprehensive evaluation of the experience. This is done anonymously.
Based on these evaluations, the workshops are very successful. Nearly all of our participants leave a workshop with the highest praise for their experience there. This in not an evaluation in the professional social science sense, however. That would require longitudinal studies of people’s lives both before and after they take a workshop. By the very confidential nature of AVP workshops, we cannot conduct such studies.
What do participants get out of the workshops?
Most participants leave a workshop with a feeling of exhilaration from having been listened to with respect, having had the goodness in themselves affirmed by others, having gained a new awareness of the presence and effects of violence in their lives and having learned strategies for resolving conflicts in positive, non-violent ways.
When and where are the next workshops and how does one register?
Workshops are scheduled throughout the year or can be organised for specific groups. AVP can also do introductory sessions of 1-3 hours.