Resources for the global digital safety training community.
Trust Building Exercises
Credits Last Updated 2017-12
Begin the training process by helping your participants get to know and trust one another.
Participants in digital security trainings frequently come from places – both physical and emotional – of high stress or anxiety.
Therefore, it is essential that they perceive a training as a safe space, where they can feel at ease sharing their fears, doubts and emotions, and can actively participate and engage with others.
These exercises, developed for the Cyberwomen holistic digital security training curriculum for women human rights defenders by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, will help you create an environment of peer-to-peer confidence and trust in a training setting from the very beginning, with a particular focus on collectively building shared participation and co-existence agreements for your training.
The Rules of the Game
In this exercise, you will collectively build shared participation and co-existence agreements for your training - “the rules of the game” – together with participants.
Defenders Bingo
You and your participants will begin introducing yourselves to one another in this exercise, which is built around an interactive game that encourages participants to get to know each other beyond just names.
Tricky Candy
You and your participants will begin introducing yourselves to one another in this exercise, which is built around an interactive game that encourages participants to get to know each other beyond just names.
Who Do You Trust?
In this exercise, you will lead participants through a process of reflection with the goal of identifying perceived allies and adversaries in each of their individual contexts. The allies and adversaries identified in this quick exercise will help you facilitate a training that is more relevant to your participants, as you will be able to better contextualize different sessions to their specific context(s).