PARTNERS CDP runs Training for Transformation in Ireland
PARTNERS Training for Transformation began in 1981. As an organisation Partners has two identities. It is both an independent agency and a Training Project within the Community Development Programme through which it has received funding since 1990.
PARTNERS runs training in Intercultural Education, Facilitation Skills Training and Reclaiming Economics among other subjects.
It is best known however for running the Training for Transformation (TFT) course which is an exciting 75 hour training workshop.
It combines discovery, learning and action at the Personal, Interpersonal and Wider Society dimensions of life. A basic belief underlying the training is that community development and working for change needs to address these three aspects of life. Main elements include:
a) Human Relations skills
b) Organisation development
c) Social Analysis
d) The principles and methods of Paolo Friere
e) Concepts of transformation
PARTNERS facilitators come from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines which complements and strengthens TFT.
PARTNERS has mainstreamed its international links across the world. These links are actively maintained through occasional requests to work abroad as well as planning joint projects in the future.
To book a Training course with PARTNERS or to find out more log onto:
www.trainingfortransformation.ie

Paulo Freire (1922 - 1997) - The Facts
• In the 1950s, Freire ran literacy campaigns with small farmers in the poverty-stricken north east of Brazil. His teaching programs and materials were designed around the lived experience and the social, political and economic context of the people he worked with.
• In 1964, there was a right-wing military coup in Brazil. Freire was jailed as a subversive and subsequently spent 15 years in exile.
• Freire wrote his famous ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ in 1970
• During his exile his ideas became better known around the rest of the world. Literacy and consciousness raising programs organized by Black, Hispanic and feminist organisations used Freire’s ideas.
• Brazil stayed under military rule for two decades. During this time Freire’s ideas on education were banned.
• He returned to Brazil under a political amnesty in 1980.
• In 1989 Freire was made Education Secretary of San Paolo, Brazil.
• Freire died of a heart attack on May 2nd, 1997.

Paulo Freire in modern times . . . Dublin hears how to change the world.
By Sharon Browne
Fatima Freire, daughter of the famous Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, was in Dublin in the summer of 2001 and her message remains as relevant now as then. She was among the guest speakers at a global gathering of Training for Transformation organisations from 27 countries which was held as part of the Millennium Nourishment Day hosted by Partners._ Partners is the Irish project that has been running Training for Transformation (TFT) workshops for 20 years, in order to provide community development training using Paulo Freire's theory of adult education._ Speaking of her father's work, Fatima Freire stated: “It is a legacy that is both difficult and rich at the same time. I see it as a source of energy and empowerment for the world in the process of enabling transformation. What I learned from my father was to never stop being curious and to never stop questioning. I can remember at school, the child who used to sit next to me never had a lunch. I would go home and ask my parents why. Little by little my father explained and helped me to understand the political problems of our country."

ACTIVE AGENTS
Paulo Freire believed that schools train us to merely adapt to our world as it is presented to us. Schooling he said was about domestication rather than transformation. Traditional education deposits knowledge into the empty heads of participants and kills their creativity, leading to apathy. His work was about getting people to recognise that together they have the power to be active agents of positive change.
At home in Brazil, Ms. Freire carries her father's message by training teachers in his methods. She says that the key issues that concern her own community are the huge divide between rich and poor, the lack of democracy, the social problems that arise from widespread alcoholism, and the exploitation of young children at work.

STEVE BIKO
Also speaking at the event were the two authors of the Training for Transformation Handbooks that have been used in communities all over the world for over 30 years. Anne Hope spoke of the work Paulo Freire had done with Steve Biko in South Africa at the height of Black Consciousness in 1972.
Sally Timmel told the gathering of her work over the last ten years as a lobbyist in Washington D.C. with church groups. When asked how Freire's principles can be used to tackle issues in the context of an ever increasing culture of contentment and consumerism her advice was to broaden the base of groups that we all work with and to think strategically.

SEIZE THE MOMENT
“There are moments for openings and then there are moments when things are not open. You have to seize that moment. In the 1990's, 76% of US citizens said the health care system was not working for them. There was heat in that. It was an opportunity to motivate people on that issue. We felt that was one institution we could crack.” Timmel says that the challenge for us in the developed world is to use Freire's principles to work towards economic literacy, so that the people can make informed ethical choices and lobby their governments to do the same.

For more information about Training for Transformation contact Partners at 24 Northbrook Road, Dublin 6.
Tel. 01-6673440. www.trainingfortransformation.ie