The Gender Training Platform is part of a vision for ever-expanding, nuanced, and intersectional ways of thinking about gender and social justice in the context of international development, humanitarianism, philanthropy, and human rights. As such, trainings on the Gender Training Platform are intended bring together theory, research, and practice into a form of critical feminist praxis, creating spaces where participants can learn critical knowledge along with ways to apply that knowledge into their work. 

Although trainers have independence over how to design and deliver trainings, the following principles help ensure that trainings are aligned with the values and vision of the Platform. The following principles draw on feminist pedagogies, experiences, and practices.* Download a copy of our principles here.

Principles

1.     Care, accessibility, and inclusion. Trainers should create caring, accessible, and inclusive training spaces. People learn best when they feel cared about, respected, and like they belong. Trainers will strive to embody the practice of caring within our workshops. We will work toward making their online trainings as inclusive as possible across different levels of internet access, digital skills, language ability, disability, caring responsibilities, and so on.

2.     Participatory. Trainings should use participatory and interactive training methods so that participants are not just recipients of information, but are able to actively engage with the material, sharing their experiences, and learning from each other.

3.     Consent. Trainings should be participatory, but participation should not be forced. Participants deserve the right to choose when and how to participate. We will create a space that gives participants multiple ways in which they can engage with the content so that they can exercise their own agency in how they participate and interact with others. This means they also have options to opt out (e.g., of breakout groups, speaking, turning on their video camera, etc).

4.     Intersectionality. Training content should advance social justice and intersectional feminist approaches. While many trainings tend to focus on gender justice and oppressions resulting from patriarchal systems, we will also work to put them in the context of other intersecting systems of oppression, like white supremacy and racism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, and ableism.

5.     Critical praxis. Trainings need to be practical and applicable while also cultivating critical thinking to help participants develop a stronger analytical lens as they practice applying the information they are learning. In addition, trainings should help participants reflect critically about the gender and development sector in which the trainings are a part. Content should challenge the top-down, donor-driven, neocolonial mindset of development. We will encourage participants to critically reflect on and question assumptions about trends, frameworks, tools, templates and “best practices” related to the training topic.

6.     Activism. Trainers will design and deliver content that is grounded in broader movements toward feminist change and social justice. We will use our trainings to share information that amplifies and supports feminist and other forms of social activism. We will design and deliver trainings that center the voices and experiences of the people most affected. Trainers have responsibility for setting up ways to holding themselves accountable to movements for social justice.

7.     Reflexivity. Trainers will work on an ongoing basis to be self-aware of the power hierarchies we occupy and the privilege we hold. We will never fully understand or even know about all the injustices people face, but we will work to self-evaluate our own power and privileges vis-à-vis others, especially those participating in our training or co-training alongside us. Trainers will also encourage participants to be self-aware of how their actions or inactions within the workshop are affecting others and themselves.

8.     The trainer is a learner too. Trainers aim to decenter their own authority and expertise and hold participants’ personal and lived experiences as valid and important. We recognize that participants also have much to contribute to each other and to their own learning.

9.     Acknowledgement. Our work is inspired, motivated, and informed by the work of other trainers, facilitators, gender specialists, and feminists that became before us – whether 500 years ago or 2 weeks ago. Of course, we cannot remember and acknowledge everyone who informed us. Still, trainers commit to acknowledging the people and groups who directly informed the content and expression of our trainings, to the best of our knowledge and ability.

Accountability

Trainers are responsible for setting up their own accountability measures. Cynara will put the following accountability mechanisms in place:

●      Transparency: This list of principles will be publicly available on Cynara’s website for trainees to read at anytime.

●      Feedback: All trainers will do a feedback survey at the end of the course with a template provided by Cynara. It will include a question such as “is there anything we did to make you feel excluded?” In the spirit of care, the feedback survey will not be anonymous, which encourages thoughtful critique. Constructive critiques are welcome, but being mean is not. Answering the survey is optional.

*For examples of feminist training pedagogies, see Gender Training: A Transformative Tool for Gender Equality by Lucy Ferguson, London: Palgrave Pivot, 2019.