Rising Voices Grantee Project Update

Clogher participants write welcome messages for their blogs.

The first training from the Empowering Cloghers Project kicked off this past Sunday, August 17th, with a group of passionate and enthusiastic trainees. It was a productive training despite being the first time that all the trainees met together.

Before getting started, Ms. Chak Sopheap, Executive Director of Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR), who is a Clogher herself, showed the trainees a video that she and her fellow bloggers jointly produced during the Blogger Tour in Berlin, Germany. The video highlighted six different bloggers from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Germany describing their experiences and inspirations. 

Participants were asked about their expectations. Almost everyone agreed that they wanted to blog so that they could help raise awareness about women’s rights, share this useful training and experience with others, and become good bloggers. This was great to hear, as we didn’t expect the trainees to be so clear in their objectives so early on in the project.

As Sopheap shared on her Facebook page,

A productive Sunday, and I am impressed with these young women who have a clear mission to start their blogs with a clear social purpose!

This first training session focused on equipping the Cloghers-to-be with basic technical skills. They were asked to think about a catchy name, as well as issues or angles that they wanted for their blogs. Their final task was to draft their own welcome messages, so that when they set up the blogs, they would have their first posts ready to publish right away.

Participants brainstorm their blog name and issues of focus

After everyone completed their welcome messages, we moved on to the next session: how to create and design a blog. 

Some of the trainees were a bit shy during the first training and were not very comfortable talking to everyone else yet. But one positive and promising outcome of this first training is that one participant has already set up a Facebook group so that all of the trainees can stay connected to each other in between training sessions through social media, without being asked to do so by the trainers.

The next training is scheduled for the end of August, and we really are looking forward to meeting and working with these great trainees again!