BREADS organized the first Child Rights and Action Movement (CREAM) project phase II staff training for the coordinators and two social activists from every district. The training was held for 2 days on 13th and 14th July 2016 at Don Bosco Provincial House, Bangalore. CREAM Phase II will be implemented in 10 districts viz. Bidar, Yadagiri, Kalaburagi, Raichur, Bellari, Davangere, Chitradurga, Bangalore, Ramanagara and Mysore. This two days training is the springboard for the CREAM project staff to start their action in the districts. Project briefing and advocacy was the main topics dealt during the programme. On the first day Ms. Kavitha Rathna, Director – Advocacy, Concerned for Working Children (CWC) handled the session on advocacy, it was very simple and easy to comprehend. She gave inputs on different strategies, effective methods and few leads that could be employed in any advocacy action. She took the experience of the staff from CREAM Phase I to build the idea of extending advocacy further and that helped the staff to understand it better. Few promotional videos on advocacy by children were also screened during the session and impart the indication that advocacy can be child led too. The follow session was on culling out different strategies for advocacy in each district for different child right violation issues using the chapathi diagram to realize the power of different stakeholders for advocacy action. The participants were divided in to groups according to the districts and to come out with advocacy action plans for different issues faced by children.
Day two was totally on briefing the project including understanding the project, objectives, targets and expected outcome impact of CREAM. Capacity building session on documentation was also done to improve the documentation skills and result in better projection of results and impact. There were discussions about the challenges that they faced in first phase and came out with solutions for the same. The staff shared that the training was very useful and they will be able to implement the CREAM II better now.
