This may sound common-place, but the most important ingredient in a collaboration process are the people involved and the quality of engagement they bring into the collaboration. No amount of external inspiration, material resources and techniques can compensate for that if it is missing. Make sure then to give importance to how the team members encounter and get to know each other. Don’t shy away from using techniques of non-formal pedagogy to create a space for people to get to know each-other in playful ways. You can also add your favourite focus. For instance, to initiate an international artivism training we used the sequence bellow, which only had non-verbal activities. Why did we chose that? In our group there were people with four different languages, and to the languages, the accents a whole lot of preconceptions and stereotypes could be connected (compare the status of a native British English speaker to the one with a huge French accent and a limited vocabulary). So we wanted participants to meet each other and create the first impressions outside of all these associations and status differences. Use this as an inspiration, and create your own sequences. We used several activities of Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non Actors.
