London Blog
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Sophie Hope, Rachel Zipfel, Charlotte Gilsenan and Gudrun Jevne from Street League welcomed an unprecedented number of 37 participants at a Self Defence and Goal Setting day held at Endell Street and The Gym, Covent Garden.
Participants came from various Street League sessions: Covent Garden, Brixton, Clean Break (Kentish Town) and Greenwich Islamic Centre (Plumstead) fitness sessions and from the Somers Town women’s football session - bringing people from different Street League sports sessions together in order to
- hear about Street League and Dress for success: the sessions, the courses, the opportunities!
- set goals for the future.
- learn about personal safety and self defence: verbal skills, assertiveness and physical techniques.
Thanks to encouragement and support from staff and volunteers from the Migrants’ Resource Centre, Church army hostels and SLAM for getting so many committed participants to the workshop. Also thank you so much to the brilliant staff at Endell Street supporting us throughout the day adapting to ever more people coming through the door -! The previous world record for women’s participation at a Street League workshop was 10. Before that it was 4, so this was a great landmark in terms of women’s participation.
Through hearing about Street League’s and Dress for Success’ opportunities, participants were armed with ideas to put on their Action Plan. On individual Action Plans goals were identified and put down on paper, next steps were decided upon and some tools were given for how to achieve one’s goals.
The self defence discussion was powerful – when the brilliant instructors from the London Centre for Personal Safety opened the session with “why are you here – what are your fears?” the group was not short of answers. People could share experiences, and the instructors with 30 years experience in the field responded to the contributions with great insight and warmth. When one violent attack was described by a participant, the instructors asked “did you know this person who attacked you?” the answer was “he told me he loved me”. The sheer number of powerful contributions to the discussion demonstrates the real need for this type of workshop.
One of the most important messages from Claudia, one of the self defence trainers, was that stereotypical feminine displays (crying, pleading, being submissive) are not useful, in fact in can make a difficult situation a lot worse. Instead we learnt and practiced assertiveness and taking control of the situation. Useful and clever aspects of personal safety and self defence were highlighted and physical techniques practiced (see pictures). The participants’ feedback was that the workshop was both empowering and gave confidence.
If you participated, please feed back to us what you thought about the day, what was good about it and how we can improve it for next time! If comments are of a personal nature, email me on gudrun.jevne@streetleague.co.uk
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