An Update from Karen Pryor Clicker Training
Over the past months, we have taken steps to educate ourselves about the challenges faced by trainers from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities. We have also initiated plans to increase the presence of positive reinforcement trainers from those communities. Below is an update on our ongoing efforts.
We have created and publicized scholarships for our foundation and comprehensive dog training courses, as well as for ClickerExpo LIVE, as part of our effort to expand opportunities for BIPOC trainers to learn or advance positive reinforcement training skills. We have awarded 65 scholarships to date. While the award process has been successful, only some of the scholarships that have been awarded have been used, so the net impact as measured by scholarship enrollments in 2020 was smaller than our goal. Consequently, we'll be examining and refining our approach to scholarships in 2021 in order to improve on these results.
KPA, IAABC, and CCPDT assembled a diverse group of trainers to participate in an initial series of workshops centered around the idea of inclusion and exclusion. The goals were understanding the characteristics of more inclusive environments and evaluating our programs and policies against those characteristics. We are grateful to the trainers from the BIPOC community who have participated and continue to participate with us in this process.
We have embarked on an exploratory joint venture with a non-profit organization to develop a program to introduce positive reinforcement training to children in underserved communities. While still in its evaluation phase, if all goes well we expect to have information that we can share publicly in the late spring/early summer. We are also planning educational discussion events for the training community in 2021.
We look forward to sharing more updates as they are available throughout the year.