Building Bridges Statement

The Toolkit was designed to collect and share the know-how on voluntary projects involving people seeking or who have recently found refuge, as well as raising awareness on forced migration in general. The collection of guidelines, methods and case studies is non-exhaustive and should simply foster your own inspiration and support you in implementing projects on the topic. The creation of the Toolkit has been driven by the ever bigger need of the international SCI network to exchange best practices on projects in the field. It was coordinated by SCI Switzerland with the support of Útilapu Hungary. Its existence wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the Mercator Foundation Switzerland and the active contribution of the Building Bridges working group and a number of SCI branches.

METHODS AND TOOLS serve to support your work on the topic of refugees and migration with different target groups.

ARE YOU PREJUDICED?

A warm-up exercise for teambuilding of new groups

Time needed: 10-15 minutes

Objectives and aim: The aim of the activity is to become aware of your own prejudices and also in a fun way to find out what kind of first impression do the other group members have about you

Level of difficulty: easy; no much preparation needed, no skills needed from the participants

Resources needed: Pen and a piece of paper for everybody

Number of participants: 5 – 15

Contact: Suvi Helko suvihelko@gmail.com

    Description
    This is a fun ice breaker for a new group to get to know each other better and become aware of their own prejudices towards other people.

    Steps:

    1. The organizer of the activity prepares beforehand a list of topics such as favorite food/music/color/movie, study-/workplace, special skill, dream travel destination, worst nightmare, spiritual animal, dream job as a child… Let your imagination fly! Make one question less than the number of participants. 
    2. Set the participants sitting in a circle, give everybody a piece of paper and a pen and ask them to write their name on the paper
    3. Switch papers clockwise 
    4. Ask the first question on the list and ask the participants to write down what they THINK is the answer of the person whose name is on the paper 
    5. Switch papers clockwise 
    6. Ask the second question on the list, switch papers, and repeat until everybody has guessed the answer for each person and got their own paper back 
    7. Go through the answers question by question within the group and discuss their real answers to the questions

    Tips:

    Make sure everybody has enough language skills to participate in the game and prepare to explain some terms, if the group language level is not very high. Make sure the participants always write about the person whose name is on the paper, and not always about the first person they were writing about.

    CONTRIBUTE!

    You can share your experience, observations, tips and tricks, pictures etc. by uploading for instance a method or a case study to the Building Bridges Toolkit. As this Toolkit is a work in progress to which all involved parties are invited to contribute, we would also be very grateful for your support and contribution in order to inspire others to continue the work towards peace and intercultural understanding.

    UPLOAD AND SHARE!