Encounters’ Shop in Dewsbury

Community Exchanges

Encounters’ Ben Yeger led this two-phase process over 12 weeks.

In March, Ben ran workshops with seven community groups of different ages and cultures in seven neighbourhoods around Dewsbury to explore identity and unearth hot topics within existing groups.

The outcomes of this phase informed another series of workshops in May which took place within the Encounters Shop, focusing on bringing inter-cultural and inter-generational groups of people together to explore identity and offer an increased sense of connection between different groups. These experiential workshops combined theatre, ecopsychology and therapeutic techniques to create an accessible safe framework for profound personal and collective exploration around identity for participants.