The Critical Thinkers Club

The Critical Thinkers Club

The Critical Thinkers Club is a self awareness and improvement boot camp for young men to introduce them to successful life skills and concepts of good self governance. We are intelligent biological machines, who's minds are comparable to computers as intelligent electronic machines.

Our brains are comparable to CPU's, which process a computers information. Our minds, like operating systems govern programs to perform tasks and solve problems. Programs are updated frequently with new lines of code (education, social trends, external influences ) but can also be infected by Malware (trauma, harmful programming, damaging family traditions and negative peer pressure).

The Critical Thinkers Club enables our young men to apply an anti-virus (coping mechanisms, support networks, recognition of non beneficial communication and self validation) to the challenges of malware viruses by external parties. All of these concepts are explored during circle time sessions between peer guides and beneficiaries.

Delivering young men critical thinking skills enables them to make the best choices for their life decisions from early on

We're now delivering the Critical Thinkers Club with FE partners

Small sessions ensure every participant gets an opportunity to contribute

Ideally sessions are held with between 10 and 20 young men, which is a healthy enough number to not lose any of the cohorts who may be less socially advanced. During the two hour sessions guided by staff and managed by peer mentors, youths discuss the issues presented and explore ways of dealing with challenges for the purposes of adopting the tools into their daily routines.

The program trains peer mentors to deliver sessions in order for the cohorts to better relate and resonate with the tools being presented. Seeing and hearing from young men slightly older than them gives them a more realistic pathway to accomplish adopting the tools outlined.

Sessions are evaluated to acknowledge a starting point where young men are when they arrive on the program to compare how they shift after each session. By distributing work books (with guided sections) that feel more like note books for recording thoughts during sessions, they can clearly recognise the shift in self awareness and their growth based on the sessions.

Making cohorts self aware best prepares them to understand the infinite life choices they have at their disposal

We work by creating contracts with local authorities, public organisations and grant making foundations to deliver neccesary services such as the Critical Thinkers Club initiative

The Civic Solutions Partnership is how ADPAC CIC engage with the public sector and grant making foundations to create contracts for the initiatives we deliver. Firstly we hold public consultations with cohorts of the African and African/Caribbean community to ascertain needs and requirements.

We do this with questionnaires that are discussed by groups to ascertain their challenges, anxieties, aspirations and desires in a specific area in order for our public health approach teams to form policies that initiatives can be created from. We then take those initiatives and seek contracts to deliver them to African and African/Caribbean cohorts.

Unlearning & Relearning is a specific method of cleansing ones mental system by replacing poor habits and characteristics with healthy habits and characteristics

Hackney Wick football team - It's important to make an impact in existing teams to align their cohesive thinking

The Critical Thinkers Club is now being delivered with grassroots delivery partner, Crying Sons and delivered to African and African/Caribbean male students at BSix college in Hackney. Our funding from Kwanda has enabled us to deliver this FE proof of concept at no charge to BSix.

The Critical Thinkers Club is the first initiative we're delivering from the African/Caribbean Boys Wellness project study. This project was created to enable African and African/Caribbean young men to circumvent the affects of structural racism by enabling them with the social and soft skills to better navigate society.

By working with institutions that come in to contact with our young men, we intend to make breakthroughs on both sides that empower African and African/Caribbean young men to establish parity of lived experience with English young men as opposed to the racial hurdles being allowed to remain in place.

Download the peer leadership PDFs & PowerPoint below:

Safe Space Leadership Training

.pdf

Download PDF • 3.92MB

Safe Space Peer Leadership Evaluation

.pdf

Download PDF • 2.23MB

Critical Thinkers Club

.pptx

Download PPTX • 1.42MB