Working with Clowns Without Borders
I was a member of the Clowns Without Borders group this semester, along with Josh, Chantel, and Kaniya. At the start of the semester, we spent a lot of time in Zoom sessions with Naomi, getting to know the values of the organization and understanding what we were expected to bring to the table. We learned that Naomi was eager for a way to convey experiences from their visits to refugee camps, as well as a developmental aspect that could be incorporated into the protocol. Initially, we were confronted with CWB having only two employees, aside from the Clowns who volunteered for the individual missions. Also, because they travel and perform worldwide, this protocol must be adaptive across cultures and languages.
My team and I talked through Google Chat and email, and we made a point of sending Naomi our meeting agenda before each meeting. We constructed an interactive methodology highlighting CWB’s intervention capabilities within several weeks of working as a team. Our group developed a valuable acronym to communicate the experiences of the communities with which the CWB interacts: People, Place, and Play. This would be a method of instructing photographers on what to photograph for the interactive visual. This would draw attention to the people, their struggles, and the specific environmental and cultural challenges they face.
In addition, we wanted to highlight the audience and their stories by including a developmental or psychological aspect; however, it was difficult to conceptualize, given the small and changing nature of each performance. Initially, we planned to develop types of questions that could be presented to the children to allow them to share their stories and become active agents in their narratives, given the prevalence of the refugee as victim narrative.
The Pecha Kucha was very helpful in tying up loose ends and making suggestions about this aspect of our protocol. We discovered through discussion that it would be beneficial to make the element more reflective for the children after realizing how helpful it would be to highlight self-reflective understanding due to the limited time frame with the children themselves. Following our most recent meeting with Naomi, we decided to design a reflection worksheet that Naomi can distribute within the general Clown education to emphasize the need and helpfulness of reflection in children.
Initially, I had my eye on working with another NGO, but in retrospect, I’m delighted I could work with my team and Clowns Without Borders. It pushed both me individually and us as a team. Overall, I was pleased that we could create something that will benefit the children involved in these performances, which can be changed and expanded upon over time, allowing these children’s stories and experiences to be shared while also being adaptable within CWB. Within my group, I believed we had a wide range of specialties that allowed us to work well together. It was beneficial to have varied perspectives and how we all worked to achieve our goal of developing a story-sharing protocol for Clowns Without Borders.
