Help domestic abuse survivors in Italy with tech

What have we been up to?

In sum:

• We created a Working Group which will be in charge of structuring and planning the online courses, establishing respective roles of coordination and facilitation of the courses;
• We mapped the women’s shelters that could potentially benefit from and be interested in the training;
• We carried out interviews with women’s shelters to map out their training needs;
• We participated in an online Training organized specifically for us to enhance our knowledge on creating online training courses that are interactive and dynamic.

In the month of June Chayn Italia established a GlobalGiving Working Group that will develop and participate in the project Help domestic abuse survivors in Italy with tech. The Working Group is organised and divided in the following areas of work and operation:

• Project Coordination: This area deals with overseeing and supervising the overall project, to ensure communication between the different areas and to liaise with the women’s shelters.
• Administration: This area is tasked with the financial and administrative management of the project.
• Online Training: This area plans and prepares the tools to carry out the training with women’s shelters.
• Communication: This area is in charge of managing social media, press office, organisation of events to present the training workshops.

Having organised our Working Group in these different areas, the respective teams got straight to work. First, the Project Coordination and Online Training teams mapped various women’s shelters spread across Italy that could be interested in and benefit from our online training workshops, particularly in light of the important changes and adjustments they have had to make due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, most notably towards increased reliance on technological devices and remote working.

To carry out this mapping activity, we knew it was crucial to get information directly from women’s shelters as to their specific needs, operational contexts and unique challenges they might be facing. To collect this information in a structured and uniform manner, we drafted an online questionnaire with eight questions aimed at understanding how the shelters’ work and operations had been impacted by the health emergency. The questions specifically evaluate the strategies and tools turned to by the shelters to continue to guarantee their availability and responsiveness to requests for assistance, how survivors were reacting to these new approaches, the main obstacles faced and the level of know-how in the safe use of these technologies. The questionnaire also sought to identify where and how Chayn might provide support, especially in the use of digital tools.

Meanwhile, the Communications team was in charge of spreading the questionnaire online in order to reach a greater number of women’s shelters. So far we have received questionnaires from 15 women’s shelters in different Italian cities (Rome and the Lazio province, Venice, Messina, Caserta, Trieste, Gorizia and others).

To have the broadest possible view of what women’s shelters are facing across the different regions of the country and complement the information received via the questionnaires, we also carried out 11 phone interviews with operators and volunteers of women’s shelters. This has also been crucial in gaining a sense of their potential interest in receiving our online training. We continue to liaise directly with the shelters to ensure the outcome of our activities responds to their concrete needs.

From this information, the Project Coordination team elaborated a Needs Assessment, which identifies the areas in which Chayn Italia can provide a contribution. In particular, our course will focus on how to use digital communication methods in a safe and secure way, and how to insert these methods in the support processes which women’s shelters provide for women who have lived or are living abusive relationships.

In the month of June the Working Group participated in a day of training to facilitate the virtual courses. The objective of the workshop Train the Trainers was to gain tools and strategies aimed at providing online courses in a participatory way, through accessible and stable digital platforms and through methodologies based on Experiential learning. Thanks to this workshop, the Chayn Italia team was able to enhance its skills in structuring an agenda for online training, its ideal duration and rhythm of the sessions, strategies to render the training as inclusive as possible and how to deal with the most common technological hiccups. 

In the coming months, the Chayn Italia team will be dedicated to the design and development phase of the online classes to be provided to women’s shelters: we will be planning and structuring the classes, realising lesson plans, elaborating materials that will be used during the course and preparing our invites.