@Dr. Mary Tyszkiewicz is excited about the collaboration of Heroic Improvisation and GCN to help youth feel more confident in building resilient communities for climate change in Kenya!

Expert Feedback Comment 3: Sustainably Scale Approach Beyond Improvisation and with Local Partners


In our initial work in the Philippines, we found that many repetitions frequently is a good way to rapidly improve the program. We also used this same pattern to train new people to train other communities in Heroic Improvisation. Our pilot project was a grassroots effort, funded by family, friends and volunteers. With more resources, we plan to keep this same successful pattern of many, small, and fast iterations to improve the youth program. As the program improves, we can use alumni from previous programs to help teach the next community. In this Open IDEO effort, we will collaborate with the local Philippine Red Cross and emergency responders to teach the disaster knowledge and skills to the youth groups. To make this effort sustainable over the long haul, we are searching for a well-funded local partner organization to help communities help themselves be resilient to climate change. This partner organization would monitor on-going projects, book new communities for training and collect evaluation information the youth generates from each community. With more and more grassroots inputs, we would improve the program and document how small communities are coming up with their own creative solutions to resilience. As a grassroots effort with on-going funding, we envision this work as a sustainable curriculum that can be maintained by local community centers and schools. We also would enroll the leaders of the local government units (barangay captains) to link our efforts as input to government activities. We are working on a comic book manual for Heroic Improvisation that will be easily translatable to the many languages in the Philippines, once we expand outside of Metro Manila. Images are a powerful way to communicate important information to large communities.  See also team-member Gabe Mercado's list of local partners in his comment below from December 20, 2015.

Expert Feedback Comment 2: Trauma and Local Participant Project Support


Because the Philippines has so many natural hazards, most Filipinos have been disaster survivors in their own lifetimes. This is another reason the Philippines is good testing ground for global climate change resilience projects. In our proposed project, we will collaborate with local Filipino social workers in the communities. Improv games were created in the 1930s in the U.S. through collaboration between social workers and actors to help U.S. immigrants. Social workers have been great collaborators for our U.S. project and they helped us handle trauma issues as they come up in the workshops. We will adapt our training based on our Filipino experiences and the expertise of our collaborating social workers. The goal of our Filipino pilot is for the local youth groups to bring their projects for community resilience to fruition. Depending on funding, this project will work with one to three youth groups in Metro Manila urban slum communities. Currently, the pilot is envisioned as a four-month project, in four phases. Phase I is an initial 4-day intensive leadership training of the youth, at an off-site location. Phase II is four 1/2-day training sessions over four weeks to develop the youth groups' disaster knowledge, skills and abilities for resilient communities with collaborating local partners. Phase III is five 1-day sessions over five weeks for the youth to create their projects for their local communities with expert mentors. Phase IV is four 1-day sessions when the youth implement, document and evaluate their resilient communities projects.