We included the text below when we released the Train-the-Trainer Retreat Guide, but we still get questions about why we don’t do train-the-trainers and even more often we get messages asking us to facilitate one. Because of this we felt it was a good thing to have its own blog post for.
For years, we facilitated Safe Zone Train-the-Trainers as a service. We do not do that any more for a few reasons.
The first is that our goal for the Safe Zone Project has always been to be a free online resource first and foremost. When we were traveling around conducting Train-the-Trainers, we were spending more time doing the trainings than creating resources that could empower you to do your own.
The benefit of doing dozens of Train-the-Trainers with a ton of different types of organizations, however, was that we learned a lot of lessons. We did enough Train-the-Trainers to test out new activities and schedules, tweak our prep and goals, get a solid sense of what works well for most groups, and what doesn’t.
We realized we were at a place where we could literally write down all that stuff we had learned, and translate it into a guide for others to follow. And that’s exactly what we did with this guide. We stopped accepting Train-the-Trainer requests, and started planning out the Safe Zone Train-the-Trainer Toolkit.
And the final reason we’re happy to have worked ourselves out of a “job” by providing these resources to empower you to do these trainings yourself: this is way more sustainable!
At least in terms of gas, dollars, logistics, and the ability for an organization to keep improving their Safe Zone Program, running it all internally is the best way to go. We’ll count on you to print responsibly, and we can add some sustainability points on that measure as well.
Have any questions for us about how to start a Safe Zone Program in your community? Check out our lead page for help and if you don’t find what you’re looking for—send us a message and let us know what support you need!