What is the Philadelphia Trainers' Collaborative?

The Philadelphia Trainers' Collaborative is:

A newly forming group of community educators, organizers, and trainers who believe in and practice education to transform people and communities.

Our goals:

To create a space to gain skills, share ideas, brainstorm, and try out new approaches
To build community among people who use education as a vehicle for social change
To examine how to use community education to confront power dynamics and institutionalized forms of oppression

What we care about:

Strengthening participatory education in Philadelphia and beyond

We believe in the potential of well-designed participatory community education that happens in neighborhood centers, churches, living rooms, meeting rooms, after-school programs and in any setting where people come together!

Exploring creative and participatory ways to present information and teach skills

We want to integrate experiential learning, arts-based approaches, hands-on training, popular education, and interactive methods into our work.

Connecting people: Creating communities that build and share skills & resources

We strive to create a welcoming and open space that encourages the kind of community-building we are trying to foster through our educational work. We also want to provide support to the many educators who often work in isolation with little support and little formal training.

Learning together by teaching and doing

We believe that the best learning comes when we are teaching others, modeling what we are teaching, and bringing our whole selves to our work.

How we operate:

Regular, participatory, and reflective gatherings
Based on participant feedback, lead facilitator(s) will pick a topic and develop a loose structure for the next gathering
Participants at each gathering can bring ideas to discuss and activities to facilitate, share, or try out
Operating as a collborative, we will rotate lead facilitators from one gathering to the next
Refreshments will be provided
Suggested $5-10 donation per gathering to cover food and space costs

A little about the organizers:

Hillary Blecker recently moved back to Philly to reconnect to her roots, making herself the third generation of Sisterly Love dwellers in her family. Hillary has designed and facilitated safety and health workshops in English and Spanish in a range of settings from farms to meatpacking plants to day labor centers.

Susan Kim is a recent transplant from the Midwest, Chicago to be specific, where she designed and facilitated trainings on cultural and linguistic competence for health care providers in a variety of settings including hospitals, medical schools, and community health centers.

Jessica Levy has lived in the Philadelphia area for over 7 years and has a long-standing interest in the intersections of art (especially performing arts) and education. She has done community organizing & education around immigrant rights, LGBTQ, & civil liberties issues, designed and facilitated civic engagement and youth programs, and taught ESL.