"The Pitch" eManual for Theatre Pitching for Employment (LTT C1 "People like Us")

Aims of the tool

This tool aims to share our experiences and knowledge created during our LTT workshops and Pitching Forums (online livestream presentations of the project ideas created at the workshops).

"Pitching" is a well known and popular method of presenting self and project ideas, which is extremely important for marginalised groups such as unemployed youth. Learning how to "pitch" their ideas in a short, concise and fun manner will help young unemployed (or project managers even) to get a job or get that Grant they are interested in. This is helped with "theatre pitching" - a style of pitching that helps participants learn the details of the perfect performance or the perfect pitch.

Description of the tool

This eManual is created with the “Theatre Pitching for Employment” (2018-2020) international partnership for adult, non-formal education funded by Erasmus+. “The Pitch”, for short, the partnership is comprised from partner organisations who do educational and/or social work with some of the marginalised group(s)2 and combine nonformal education and performative arts in their work.

Partnership consist of seven (7) partner organisations from Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Poland, Slovenia, and Turkey. Partner organisations range from NGO’s (Aratos, ICCC, O.C.E.A.N., Multikultura, Prizma), to cultural centres (CeKaTe), and universities (Akeniz Uni) located in Zagreb (Croatia), Athens (Greece), Thessaloniki (Greece), Antalya (Turkey), Maribor (Slovenia), and Krakow (Poland).

With this set up, partner organisations and their participants are taught to “pitch” (present) themselves and to “pitch” their project ideas about the problems of a marginalised group in the local community that could be overcome with the help of the EU.
In other words, partner organisations aim to develop a specialised type of pitching, called theatre pitching and to share this practice with educators – both within the partnership (our staff members, volunteers) and outside (educators, facilitators, professionals, amateurs and volunteers working with these individuals and groups) – as well with members of marginalized groups (with hopes of impacting their self-esteem and employability skills)3.
The priorities of our partnership include the main, horizontal priority (a) social inclusion; and two additional priorities tied to the field of adult education (b) extending and developing educators' competences, and (c) increasing the demand and take-up through effective outreach, guidance and motivation strategies
By focusing on these three priorities our partnership aims to achieve these objectives:
• Sharing educational practices among partners
• Empowering and motivating participants
• Development of basic skills (Key Competences): communication in foreign language, learning to learn, cultural awareness, social and civic competence
• raise participants' presentation skills (both verbal & non-verbal)
• Long term objective: raising visibility of marginalized groups and motivating them to join education and labour market
• Long term: developing pitching method and network in EU
In order to achieve those goals, seven versatile and complementary partners – all of which work in nonformal education, but in their own, specific way (from a University to a “bread” house) agreed to work together and organise seven international activities of non-formal learning, i.e., theatre pitching workshops with 84 participants, including individuals from marginalised groups (people with disability, minorities and alike). Partners agreed that each partner organisation will host an educational event (workshop) that will be structured in accordance with theatre pitching general process, and focused on sharing the local, specific method - by which the host will enrich the knowledge and skills of educators from other partner organisations.
Having the theatre pitching structure of the workshop means that after each educational theatre pitching workshop, participants get to present their ideas (projects) and themselves at the final “Pitching Forum” which will be open for the public and livestreamed online (YouTube livestream video and shared via social media). These Pitching forums are crucial in our effort, as they will become “theatres of ideas” in which participants will present their ideas for projects that will benefit the local community and help connecting the local community with the EU.
In our effort not to “just” act educationally, but also to raise visibility of the problem of employability of marginalised groups, partners agreed that, alongside our online Pitching forum and video presentations, each partner organisation will publish an eManual online – so that our experiences and methods can be disseminated outside of the partnership even long after our partnership activities have ended. This eManuals should be short publications that will enable all those who are interested to recreate (or build their own) theatre pitching process and implement this useful method in their own work.
Therefore, we can conclude that sharing of practices is at the very core of our partnership and we are happy to share with you our experiences and knowledge that we gained during “The Pitch” Strategic Partnership for adult education – via livestream Pitching Forum, educational videos, and eManuals.
In this eManual, we will present the reader with the step-by-step guidelines on how to create your own theatre pitching forum and workshop, with tips & tricks, and examples of exercises that you can use in building your own theatre pitching platform (and avoiding that which we will find as redundant – based on the evaluation on our workshop “People Like us” held in Krakow, Poland.
We hope you will find it useful and inspiring and feel the need to share it further.