Active citizens: globally connected, locally engaged; facilitator's toolkit

This toolkit has been created to help facilitators to design and deliver the Active Citizens programme all over the world. Active Citizens is a social leadership programme which promotes intercultural dialogue and social responsibility as key leadership competencies in the 21st century. Active Citizens is run by the British Council working with civil society organisations all over the world. It began in 2009 and has been delivered in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. It has reached more than 100,000 people to date through its training, conferences, social research and International Study Visits. The toolkit is in five sections - the introduction to the programme, preparing a workshop, delivering a workshop and post-workshop. There is also a large resource of workshop activity plans to support facilitators throughout the training cycle. The Active Citizens programme promotes community-led social development. It motivates members of communities to take responsibility for their social needs and gives them the knowledge, skills and experience to address them. The main audiences for the programme are community leaders working in, and with marginalised communities. They are people and institutions established, trusted and valued in the community - CSOs, NGOs, religious leaders, politicians, youth workers etc. They are influential and working to improve the lives of people living in their community. The programme develops skills and knowledge to identify and engage networks to help achieve goals as well as skills to plan and implement a project. The networks are between individuals at community level; institutions engaged in social action at community level; and institutions engaged in social policy dialogue at a national level. It includes cross-sectoral networking e.g. with the business community, media, etc. The building of these networks increases social inclusion, community resilience to conflict and increases social development in communities. See Diagram 1 on page 9. The programme is flexible and adaptable. It has been delivered to diverse groups, from rural communities in North-West Frontier Province Pakistan to urban communities in East London UK, to communities vulnerable to post-election violence in Kenya and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Sri Lanka.