1. Empowerment

Empowerment

What is empowerment? Making participants feel like they can be themselves without shame, can fully realize themselves in a group and leave the group with more confidence also in the outside world. To achieve empowerment, self-help, self-advocacy-groups, selfeducation and self-empowerment-campaigns are important sources. Empowerment needs to focus on collaboration, a strength perspective, subject-centeredness, a context of orientation, solidarity professionalism and partisanship. Where does empowerment as a concept come from? The concept of “empowerment” has different origins. Partially they lie in the Civil Rights Movement in the US, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and different movements for the rights of people with disabilities. Methods for Empowerment: - SWAT-Analysis - Theater of the oppressed - Internships and Volunteering - Storytelling / Living library - Self-help & support-groups - Involve people into decision-making & structures which shape their life (e.g. Group

Agreement) - Open Space - Doing art, music, creative stuff - Playing with gender expression (e.g. through Drag) - Creating community on social media - Silent Exhibiton - Action-focused workshops

Dos and Don’ts for Empowerment Don’t: - Take control of the situation from/out of other people - Speak, decide for people or make assumptions, explore or ask what the people need - Give up - Forget to look at yourself - Force opinion/actions - Put individuals in the spotlight - Think the method works for everyone - Make the message hard to understand - Ignore other problems - Whataboutism: look at many perspectives/ problems, focus on the subject at hand. But do: