Author: Grant Wootton

by Chris Lawton, November 2020

This quarter has seen two great training innovations and some brilliant training delivered all over the world to our growing community and with our partners. Let me tell you about those:

Safety and First Aid Training in Arabic
It has always troubled me that sometimes those who need training the most face the highest barriers to participation. Sometimes this is cost, logistics or availability. Sometimes this is also due to language. To help fix this we partnered with the Skeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom and the ACOS Alliance to build and deliver a security and first aid course in Arabic for use across the Middle East and North Africa. We enrolled our first 50 participants in this course on November 14. It’s already been wonderful to see the focused approach to learning some of the participants have demonstrated so far and the real development of skills and knowledge that they have shown to us in our live events. This has been a real highlight to us and it has been a brilliant experience working with the Skeyes Center. We’d love to see more Arabic speakers completing the training in the future!

Check out our Safety Training courses for Arabic journalists.


Kidnap Training in 360 VR
We have built an immersive 360 degree VR kidnap experience to use as a training aid for those who face this serious and potentially high cost risk. It is visceral and has a great impact, as well as, in the hands of a competent trainer, giving the opportunity to clearly illustrate important training points and learning objectives. Training for this kind of scenario can increase resilience and the ability to survive in the face of this threat, both physically and psychologically, and so can be hugely important, but only if done well. We think we have a solution to democratise this knowledge, and enable safe, consistent practice, but are still in the process of finalising our approach to this. We’d love to speak with anyone who thinks they may be able to help. Contact us here. 

A still from our 360 VR kidnap experience. With a headset on it has a highly visceral impact

Training All Over the World
Together with our partners we have been able to deliver training across the planet in the past three months. This has included Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia, Nepal, India, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, the US, the UK, Sri Lanka, Spain, Oman and Turkey. Seriously, wow. Thank you everyone and well done. Let’s keep it going and get as many people trained as we can.

 

Up and running!
by Chris Lawton, August 2020 

“Silk Road provides a valuable course that could be a life saver for so many around the world” – Ana Caroline de Lima @antropologiavisual, Brazil 

We’re up and running! When we were early testing in January we predicted that it would be at least a year before we got an actual, real, customer. We planned to use this time to test some more and work out what kind of thing worked, what didn’t, what people would pay for our training and whether they’d pay at all. We even wondered if it might take up to three years for buyers to get used to the idea that technology really could deliver quality security and first aid training. But we were wrong. We’ve had some amazing endorsements, like the one above from Ana, a journalist and documentary photographer based in Brazil, and this has encouraged us to offer our courses while we continue with our development.

In the past few months we’ve provided our courses to the Orhan Dzhemal Media Security Academy which were translated into Russian. This brilliant initiative is open to professional and citizen journalists, freelancers, bloggers and online activists who use Russian as one of their working languages. I love this because it is designed for an under served community (on the use of languages, I should let you know that we can provide subtitled content in almost any language typically within 48 – 72 hours of your request).

We’ve also provided online hostile environment training and live events for Sveriges Radio and for the ACOS Alliance, who awarded 54 bursaries to freelance journalists who have been covering civil unrest in the US, Brazil and Bangladesh and for whom we created a purpose built course. Our training helped ACOS to continue their important work strengthening the safety skills and knowledge of freelance journalists who wouldn’t normally have access to this kind of training. 

We were also really pleased to provide a refresher hostile environment and first aid course online to the UK government as they sought to solve the question of how to provide life saving training for their personnel working overseas. We’ve delivered the solution to them and look forward to building this relationship in the future.

One of the best things for me about the past few months has been seeing the rise towards the mainstream of new and disruptive ideas. The discover.film VR Film Fest was the first of its kind. It was a film festival held entirely in VR for one day this month. We were delighted to partner with discover.film to sponsor and support this event. We are committed to the possibilities this technology can offer in our training and it was an amazing, crazy evening finding out where the creative community is already taking it!

• Links:
  – Check out our Hostile Environment Training courses 
  – Email for information about our bespoke immersive training
  – See our Travel Safety & First Aid courses