Watch this film to discover the course!

Illustration of a religiously and ethnically diverse group of people sitting in a circle on the floor. Illustrator: Toby Newsome.Illustration of a religiously and ethnically diverse group of people sitting in a circle on the floor. Illustrator: Toby Newsome.

What is the course?

The Local Changemakers Course is a series of nine face-to-face workshops, designed to enable groups of adults and young people to learn about, value and promote freedom of religion or belief (FORB) for all in their communities.
A complete curriculum of course materials is available and is free for any person or organisation to download and use in any way they find helpful.

Why run the course?

Many people are worried about violations of freedom of religion and about interfaith tensions in their community but are unsure of how to make a difference.

The Local Changemakers Course helps local communities to understand and value freedom of religion or belief for all and to discover tactics they can use to make a difference.

The course is designed for ordinary people – including those who consider human rights to be an irrelevance or a foreign imposition. The course brings together interfaith dialogue, peacebuilding and rights-based approaches, using a participant centered methodology with a focus on storytelling, visual communication and interactive exercises drawing upon participants’ life experiences.

The course materials are easy to adapt to any context and have been successfully tested by local facilitators with interfaith participant groups in Nigeria, Tanzania, Jordan, India and Sweden for example.

In some contexts it is dangerous to talk about human rights directly – although the course talk about rights it also includes tools and exercises that can help you talk about freedom of religion or belief without mentioning human rights – notably the storytale ‘The songs of the flute and the drum‘.

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all course materials!

Find the course materials

This course is available in 8 languages. How about your language?

All language versions.
Illustration: Woman from TanzaniaIllustration: Woman from Tanzania

The best thing about the course was how engaging and relevant to people’s concerns it was, at the same time as being simple to run and lots of fun.

Hidaya Dude

Zanzibar Interfaith Centre, Tanzania

Course aims

  • To help us recognise and appreciate diversity within and between communities.
  • To help us understand and appreciate human rights, including the right to freedom of religion or belief.
  • To identify problems for freedom of religion or belief in our communities.
  • To find ways to tackle those problems together.

Who is the course designed for?

The Local Changemakers’ Course is designed for people at the grassroots level – people who are concerned about problems related to freedom of religion or belief in their community and society, and want to find ways to make a difference. The course requires no previous knowledge, experience or even acceptance of human rights from participants. What is needed is an open mind, an interest in helping to build communities characterised by peaceful co-existence and equality, and a willingness to engage in an interactive process of mutual learning and reflection. It can be used with participants with limited literacy, but is also a great tool for use with university educated groups and local religious leaderships.

The course is designed for groups of 12-24 people but can be adapted for larger or smaller groups.

Who can facilitate the course?

The Local Changemakers Course is interactive – including group exercises, games, stories, discussions and role plays as well as presentations. Anyone with some experience of leading interactive learning processes with adults and young people can lead it. What the facilitator needs most is sensitivity to the context – the ability to judge if some issues are too sensitive or dangerous to discuss and to adapt the process accordingly, as well as the ability to handle group dynamics when sensitivities or tensions arise.

​You do not need to be experienced in or knowledgeable about human rights or freedom of religion or belief to facilitate the course. The facilitator’s guide and accompanying resources provide detailed guidance on how to run each session as well as tips for facilitation. All the information you need is provided, including scripts and PowerPoints for presentations about the issues. The facilitator’s role is not to be an expert, but to guide participants through a process of mutual learning.

Course materials

The course materials consist of a facilitators guide and accompanying materials for each session such as PowerPoints, handouts, game cards, posters and presentation scripts.

Course overview

We would love to hear your experiences of using the
course materials to make change in your community.

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