Suchismita Majumdar, Research & Policy Officer, ESDEG
In a run-up to the London Challenge Poverty Week 2023, I attended 4 online training workshops conducted by Superhighways funded by 4in10 — data collection at events, 10 ways to make the most of your content, creating content that counts, and visualising your postcode data on a map. The courses were taught by various members of the Superhighways team –Karen McLean, Clare Chamberlain, and Sorrel Parsons, sometimes in partnership and sometimes alone. All four workshops were well organised, for each workshop an email arrived the day before the event giving us a clear idea what to expect from the workshop, what we would be learning, and if they needed us to sign up for an online account beforehand to save time during the workshop. The workshops were well structed lasting for 2 hours, there was 5 to 10 of us attending. An additional challenge was that the attendees were a mixed group – some at beginners’ stage, while others were advanced. For introductions we were often split into smaller groups which gave us a chance to get to know our fellow trainees better and also a chance to discuss our requirements for the campaign. The trainers gave us real time demonstrations on how to use various tools which helped us understand those tools much better. They created a safe space where no question was silly and all our queries were patiently answered and additional help provided in case one of us needed it.
One of the sessions I attended was on a week day evening which was led by Sorrel. We were all tired and I was worried that a two-hour session post dinner might be too much. But Sorrel conducted a fantastic training, she kept us engaged throughout the session by making it interactive and informative. It was her skill as a trainer that we finished the session with more energy than we had started it with.
Post all four sessions we got follow-up emails from the Superhighways team with links to all the tools, resources and offers to additional support should we need it during the campaign. The entire experience was so well organised and seamless, they made it really easy for the attendees, all that we had to do was arrive for the training. Everything else was taken care of by the Superhighways team.
I wish I could do justice to everything I had learnt during the training. I wish I had a bit more time to explore all the tools that I had learnt about in the trainings and made use of Superhighways offer of 1-2-1 support. I ended up using Canva the most during the campaign which thanks to Superhighway training I was much more confident using.
Thank you to the Superhighways team for a fantastic experience.
