Being a friend to friendless is not an individual responsibility but an obligation. The most enduring value as a youth you will ever be able to give the community is your commitment. Try as much as you can to be friendly to the marginalised, they don’t need your money but acceptance as human beings. Patrick

FULL TEXT Tanzania ATD Newsletter April 2016

The approach: Learning from Success

Learning from Success is a method developed by Prof. Jona Rosenfeld to allow a practitioners (a teacher, a social worker, a volunteer) to learn from his or her own action. Orna Shemer, a lecturer at the University of Jerusalem, who has studied this method, came to Tanzania to help the participants in this seminar to look at their action and commitment from the angle of success.

She said from the onset: “Everyone has some success in life. (…) We know that you work together, but we will ask each of you: ‘What did you do?’ … You will say for example: ‘I invited the children’, I will ask you: ‘How did you invite them?’ … With our questions we want to get the knowledge out of each one of you… The knowledge that comes from experience”.

In this way, the focus was on what a person actually did, rather than on intentions or justifications. From this knowledge, the group then tried to formulate “Principles of Action”. These ranged from very practical sentences (e.g. ‘Adapt the setting of the action to the reality of the children’) to very deep commitments. (e.g. ‘Fight discrimination. Build peace between people’).