Active Bystanders’ Training

Active Bystanders’ Training: Creating Safety in Contentious Times

If you are a bystander witnessing a harmful situation, you have a choice to make. Do you do something?  What do you do?

Active Bystanders’ Training helps participants recognize when they are bystanders, analyze situations, and evaluate the consequences for everyone involved.

Quabbin Mediation of Orange, Mass., will offer four trainings in Franklin County in February and March. (See below for full schedule.)

Seminar Content

  • Looks at how to analyze situations in the future when harm doing is encountered.
  • Stresses safety and helps participants develop a variety of intervention techniques;
  • Examines the promoters of active bystandership (moral courage, inclusive caring, responsibility for others, reciprocity, etc.) and assists participants to discover bystanders’ positive power;
  • Discusses the universal inhibitors that keep bystanders inactive when harm is occurring; participants create action plans to overcome them;
  • Defines the roles of individuals involved in a harmful situation (target, harm doer, bystander);

Seminar Schedule

  • Feb. 24, 6-8 pm, Friday. Wendell. Free Library. Call to register: (978) 544-3559.
  • March 5, 1:30-3:30 p.m., Sunday. Second Congregational Church, 16 Court Square, Greenfield*
  • March 9, 7-9 p.m. Thursday (March 16 snow date). Temple Israel, 27 Pierce St., Greenfield*
  • March 17, 9-11 a.m., Friday. North Quabbin Community Coalition, Athol/Orange Elks, 92 New Athol Rd., Orange

*Suggested donation $10-20 (but no one turned away).

Register (unless otherwise noted in schedule) on the Quabbin Mediation website or call ​(978) 544-6142 or email info@quabbinmediation.org.