Who We Are

Partners is a group of highly committed and competent people who have chosen to work with people who suffer as a result of social injustices. Partners draws from a development tradition which has a strong southern Hemisphere flavour and many of our facilitators have worked there. The pool of knowledge, skill, connections and commitment which we have built over more than a quarter century is available to the communities who request our intervention.

Partners, Training for Transformation (TFT) began in 1981 when a number of people working in Ireland and overseas came together to explore the benefits of using experiential methods in community and development education. Training for Transformation work is largely influenced by the philosophy of Paulo Freire and the work initiated and developed by Anne Hope and Sally Timmel in Kenya (both now working in South Africa). We take great pride in our ability to give a practical application to the Freirian methodology and have been doing so fruitfully since 1981.

See HISTORY OF PARTNERS

In line with a Freirian approach, Partners is a reflective organisation which is committed to ongoing learning with a particular emphasis on learning from those with whom we work. There is a general acknowledgment that our work is of a very high quality and this acknowledgment has consistently come from the individuals and communities with whom we have worked as well as from the management of the programmes of which we have been part.

We take much pride in our track record of facilitating development and education interventions that are of high quality, relevant, flexible, tailored and based on years of experience and solid theoretical frameworks. We also put much value on the diversity of that experience. We have worked with communities experiencing disadvantage in every county in Ireland, North and South, in urban and rural settings. We have worked with groups which within themselves contain much diversity, e.g., Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland and border counties, with a range of intercultural groups and with Travellers and Settled.