Exercises

Get started with exercises on the following areas:

Facilitation skills: notes for the trainer
A suggested outline of a three quarter of a day’s course in basic facilitation skills. It can be tailored to specific needs (participatory workshops, meetings etc.).

Ice-breakers and energisers
Energisers are short activities that can be used to break up long sessions. People often struggle to concentrate for long periods of time and short games can help participants to re-focus or can offer a way of punctuating sessions.

First Steps - Introductory exercises
These exercises are ideal for starting a participatory programme within a community to help the participants build confidence in working together and to explore some ‘easy’ issues.

Exploring welfare issues
These exercises explore the current situation in communities with regard to animal welfare.

Exploring animal sentience and suffering
Often people we work with do not consider animals as sentient beings so encouraging them to think about what the animals are feeling in different situations can be valuable.

Needs and care
The exercises in this section explore what animals need and how best to care for them to ensure those needs are met.

Emphasising concepts and messages
Including: Acting out; Learning ball game; Fish bowl; What prevention, caring for animals, working together means to me; Past, present and future

Encouraging people to work together
All the work carried out with communities should involve reflection on problem solving together. The exercises below can be used to focus on collective action, specifically to consider the pros and cons.

Feedback and evaluation
This section provides some ideas for different methods of collecting feedback from a participatory event.