Photo: HB filmmaker Seth Chase boards a flight in Garowe, Somalia. Daniel J Gerstle.

TRAINING  |  HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE

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A. Online Rapid Course Webinar

B. Full Intensive Training Workshop

C. Contract 

Review Our Curriculum ===>

Part 1  |  Emergencies on the Local Level

• We review documentaries as primer for the discussion of how all war and natural disasters–and their solutions–must be solved with direct participation of local people from the affected communities.
• Local pre-existing social structures from rich to poor have often already created the conditions in which some parts of the population can survive, evacuate, and withstand suffering with more resources than others. While most people lose resources, jobs, homes, livelihoods, and loved ones, still some others actually benefit from the rapid redistribution of materials caused by the disaster.
• The most common theme of disasters is the mass loss of employment on the local level, and so the most urgent solution during and after the disaster is to get the local work force back involved in rebuilding not only the country but the markets.
• International aid must support local communities and organizations, not replace them.

Part 2  |  How Emergencies Transform Governments & Authorities

• Most wars and disasters force divisions in government and other authorities, which leads to public services ranging from hospitals to fire departments to police to power and water systems breaking down rather quickly.
• Responsibility for protecting civilians during the crisis must rest with the government or regional authority. But what if that authority only choose to help one part of the population and refuses or is unable to provide to another?
• What if the authority claims not to have the resources for such an enormous crisis?

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Part 3  |  When/Why International Support May (or May Not) Be Needed

• In earlier generations, international aid, primarily funded by governments, was a combination of patron distribution of food, medicine, etc, along with promotion of those donor government’s foreign policy aims.
• Reformed international aid in more recent decades sought instead to shift more choices and resource power to local populations, to be more successful. That meant hiring more local expertise, rather than importing expensive foreign managers, and buying supplies in local markets, rather than bringing foreign supplies that flooded the market and hurt local sellers.

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Part 4  |  Media Coverage of Emergencies

• Traditionally, media coverage of emergencies was all about the war journalist sharing a story with the world through literary features. But that rapidly transformed into not only full books and films and radio series, but also more short-form reporting, photo series, and now virtual reality.
• Considering examples from documentaries such as Five Broken Cameras (Palestine & Israel) and The White Helmets (Syria), we consider how journalistic standards have long battled to train storytellers to increase the numbers of points of view, to keep balance, and to keep objectivity, while the market and conflict factors tend to favor a very sharp, sometimes opinionated single point of view in media.
• Meanwhile, media for humanitarian and human rights advocacy must recommend an improvement while at the same time retaining impartiality. Is it possible? How can aid and rights organizations get it right?

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Part 5  |  Emergency Aid

• The Sphere Minimim Standards in Disaster Response spell out the foundation of how humanitarian aid agencies agree how to coordinate aid in terms of collective goals, standards, and measuring sticks.
• That covers the primary aid for war and disaster affected civilians: Medicine, Disease Control, Food, Food Security & Income Generation, Water & Sanitation, Shelter, Education in Emergencies, and Gender in Emergencies.
• Secondary aid, many argue, could be just as important depending on the nature of the crisis: Civilian Protection, Casework, Family Reunification, Home Reconstruction, Winterization, Evacuations, and much more.
• Meanwhile, human rights organizations advocate for solutions where there is a major gap: Have international responders made a mistake and ignored one group or one need? Have governments refused to solve an obvious urgent problem that is in their realm of responsibility? Have crimes been committed?

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Part 6  |  Reconstruction & Development

• When the emergency recedes enough for more local and international teams to get in safely, reconstruction can help bring people home.
• At the same time, throughout the crisis and after, government, aid, and trade actors must help rebuild and revitalize markets to bring back jobs which is the often the most important solution for the majority of families.

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Part 7  |  Career Building Skills & Degrees

• While some aid workers succeed with liberal arts degrees because they found ways to get deep field experience, perhaps as unpaid volunteers knowing the local language, and made good relationships in the emergency area, most aid workers succeed through master’s level specialty programs that hit right at the emergency needs: Epidemiology & Disease Control, Water System Management, Public Health in Disasters, Construction, Social Work with a specialty in Children & Trauma, and so on.
• Rights advocates similarly excel with a specialized masters in human rights advocacy and research or a law degree, but others found their way up the chain by first getting vital field experience as an aid worker, war journalist, or volunteer who knew the local language.
• Crisis journalists really should study journalistic professional standards in a master’s degree program. Conflict reporting is full of many controversies and extreme attention to journalistic standards can be an issue not only of professionalism but of security and safety for the people involved in a story. Still, some people make it in with a bachelor’s degree because they have local relationships in the crisis area. But still serious training is vital for doing stories professionally and responsibly.
• And of course in all cases, we recommend a serious Hostile Environment & First Aid Training program before deployment!

Meet Our Trainer ===>

Daniel J Gerstle  |  Founder & executive director of Humanitarian Bazaar, has served as a filmmaker, humanitarian aid worker, human rights researcher, and war journalist in Africa, West Asia, the Middle East, Caucasus, and the Balkans. More recently, he created Humanitarian Bazaar, formerly known as HELO Media, to produce projects focused on how people survive war and disaster. With Humanitarian Bazaar, he produced the Mogadishu Music Festival (Somalia 2013), Journey of Peace Kenya music festival in Dadaab refugee camp (Kenya 2013), and co-produced the first Afghan rock fest, Sound Central Festival (Afghanistan, 2011). Live from Mogadishu, his first feature length film as director, premieres in summer 2014. Find him at Humanitarianbazaar.org  |  humanitarianbazaar@gmail.com.

Arrange Your Training ===>

1. Check here if we already have a webinar or workshop scheduled which you can attend. ===> Training Schedule.
2. Write us to reserve your space for an existing training or to ask for a training which could be scheduled with you. In the latter case, just let us know what windows of time would work best for you and we will see whether it is best to have others attend together or to have a training personalized for you and/or your organization. ===> Humanitarianbazaar@gmail.com 
3. Right now we are accepting all payments for training as a donation to our War Survivors Advisory civilian protection project, and offering webinars as rewards for such donations, so you can either go right away to donate and let us know that you have done so, or schedule your training and then pay once you are satisfied with the training. The payment/donation button to support the War Survivors Advisory, along with a description of the project, can be found here. ===> Training Payment via War Survivors Advisory.