The Mentors
Left to Right: Themba, Xolani, Lavista and Fikiswa

Teaching and Training Activities with Vendor Mentors

After spending a few weeks with the vendors, it became evident that a few stood out as leaders. Our team found it beneficial to create a group of vendor “mentors” to help create a vendor-run online profile content gathering program. Out of the group of vendors we worked with four showed promising leadership qualities; Xolani, Fikiswa, Themba, and Lavista. Each vendor brought their own strengths to the group that complimented each other nicely. Xolani and Themba stood out as spokespeople, while Fikiswa and Lavista picked up on the technology aspect more quickly. We performed activities with the mentor group to advance our project with a participatory spirit. The mentors helped to give us insight into how the project could be sustainable and the best way to implement certain parts. We worked with the mentors to test certain activities and discuss how to teach these activities to other vendors. We made several How-To Guides to help with this process. All How-To Guides and other tools can be found in the resource library.

The Mentors Discussing Their Roles and The Project

Brainstorming: Two Heads Are Better Than One

Our team worked with the mentors to brainstorm various aspects of our project. We discussed ideas with the mentors and encouraged them to give us insight into how the activities would best work with the other vendors. Some topics we discussed with them included: what the project means to them,  how to explain the project to other vendors, why the project is important, how to use computers, how to use cameras, how useful cameras will be to vendors, mentor roles, and their strengths and weaknesses as a group. Brainstorming activities were also conducted before and after each activity in order to gain perspective about what went well and what could be improved. The mentors all participated giving key insights into how the activities could be run better with the larger group and together we adjusted the activities to match. See brainstorming presentations in the resource library.

The Mentors Write Their Captions To Practice

Photo Analysis Activity

For The Big Issue online marketplace, the pictures that vendors choose to post will contain a short written description of what the photo is underneath. We wanted the vendors to practice writing these descriptions with the help of the vendor mentors. At first our team called this process captioning photos; however with the help of the mentors  we found that captioning was not an easily translatable word analysis. One of the vendor mentors, Fikiswa, suggested  that “photo analysis” is a better way to describe the activity. To begin this process The Big Issue team created a photo analysis worksheet that simply required the photo name/number to be written down with a short description of the picture under it. Each mentor analyzed their own photos and then brought their captions to us,reading aloud what they had written for each photo. The mentors struggled at first with the analyzing, but as the activity went on they got better at explaining what the photo was and why it was important. The mentors each gave positive feedback that convinced us that this activity could be used with the other vendors. See the photo captioning activity presentation and worksheet in the resource library.

The Mentors Gather Around To Analyze Photos

“PhotoVoice” Activity

The idea behind “PhotoVoice” is to take meaningful pictures and describe them in one or two sentences, ultimately creating a short movie containing photos with a voice over. The Big Issue wanted to use “PhotoVoice” for weekly updates on the vendors personal online profile pages  so that customers would be informed about the vendors life. Our team wanted to give the vendors the opportunity to complete PhotoVoice activities. This activity used the “photo analysis” activity detailed above to prompt the mentors into talking about the photos they took. The mentors were helped by our team to take voice recordings of the written descriptions the vendors wrote about each photo. These voice recordings were then uploaded with the corresponding photo. These PhotoVoice “movies” were recorded and then edited with the mentors so that they could change anything they disapproved of. By using the prior “photo analysis” activity the mentors had a prompt of what they wanted to say in front of them allowing them to not feel rushed or pressured when speaking into the microphone.

Themba Intensely Looks For The Best Angle

Taking it to the Streets: How to Use a Camera and Take a Picture

While giving the mentors the skills to use a camera our team also wanted to give them a chance to take their own pictures and be able to gauge what qualified as good picture to share. In order to accomplish this our team took the mentors to the streets outside of The Big Issue office. Each mentor picked a spot around Woodstock and then all the mentors took two pictures at that spot. The mentors liked gaining perspectives of what the other vendors thought was a good picture spot. They were also very happy to have the opportunity to take the photos outside of their place of work. During this activity the mentors got to express their creativity and take pictures of things they enjoyed, not just Big Issue related material. After the pictures were taken, the mentors were taught how to upload them to a computer by plugging in the camera and dragging the folders to the desktop. The mentors were then shown each picture and they would chose their favorite out of the two they took at each spot, commenting on how some were better than others and why they were. This activity was very useful to begin teaching the mentors how to take and judge pictures, there are more details about their reactions in Act 3: Scene 3.

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