Working with ClownsWithout Borders
At the beginning of the semester my team and I was partnered with the NGO Clowns Without Borders. CWB is a non for profit organization that provides laughter and play through clown performances to children that live in refugee or displaced people’s settlements all around the world. Throughout this experience we partnered with Naomi who is the Executive Director of CWB and also a performer.
Our initial meetings with Naomi revolved around getting an in depth understanding of the work and the mission of CWB, the way that they organize and structure their performances as well as the communities they serve. A few questions that we focused on during the initial part of our collaboration were: How do CWB come in contact with the communities and how do they decide who they visit? What types of partnerships they create with local organizations and local performers? How are the performances structured in terms of entering and exiting the communities? What are a few challenges that they feel they keep facing? How can we help?
Asking those questions helped us understand how CWB operate, think and design their visits and also where do we enter the picture and help. We discussed with Naomi different challenges that CWB face. A few examples were cultural differences between performers within the team and between performers and communities, building care and resilience for the performers after interacting with adverse experiences within the communities, understanding the challenges that the communities face and how those may shape the future of their children, understanding trauma play behaviors in respect to developmental stages.
We decided to support CWB by creating a training video that would help them understand the effects of toxic stress and trauma and how they may shape the communities they visit. One of the biggest challenges we came across was the broad spectrum of the communities CWB serves as well as the incredibly diverse and different teams they work with. Those aspects were challenging in terms of cultural specificity and in terms of political and historical context of the communities we were addressing. During our process we researched about PTSD, different types of stress and trauma play. We talked with Naomi about all of those aspects as she was also working on a similar project with students from Columbia university. We also got the opportunity to meet with Naomi during her visit in New York and co-present with her at Columbia the research we conducted since the beginning of the semester. We also got to meet Watson who is the point of contact for the Columbia university team and get his feedback for our final training video. Finally, we got to meet one of the performers Rachel who participated in our meetings and shared her experience.
Our final project consists of a training video about toxic stress and trauma that will serve as a tool and a baseline training for the CWB performers. We created the video consistent with CWB’s visual communication materials keeping in mind that they may decide to add more elements or modify it in the future. The final training video will be in the hands of CWB. It will hopefully serve as a first level training for the performers and it will provide them with the knowledge to understand a little more about the experiences of the communities they visit.
