Kindness in emergencies

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here.  Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough helpers for each team to have one. You may need some parents and carers to help out if you’re short on helpers.

Planning for this activity

• Head over to the Red Cross’s First aid skills page and load up some of the first aid scenarios to watch later. Under the Educator zone tab, choose some games, role plays or resources for the group to use later. You could also select some activities which support the Emergency Aid Staged Activity Badge.
• You may want to load the videos below, which explore the bystander effect.

Run the activity

1. The person leading the activity should get everyone together where they can see the screen, and play the videos. When they have finished, see what the group thought of the people who didn’t do something to help. Ask if anyone would’ve done something differently if they were walking past.
2. Everyone should get into groups of three or four. The person leading the activity should cut the ‘Barriers and solutions’ cards in half horizontally and give them out to each group. One or two people in each group should have the top half of the card and the other person or people should have the bottom half.
3. The person or people with the top halves of the card should read out a barrier to the rest of their group. The others in the group should try to come up with the solution. If they like, the person or people with the top halves can give clues. After three guesses, they should reveal the correct solution if it hasn’t been guessed. Then, the person or people with the bottom halves of the card should read out a barrier to their group and have them try to guess the solution. Continue until all barriers and solutions have been read out.

You could also do this task altogether if you’d like to save paper, with the person leading the activity reading out the barriers and everyone guessing the solutions together.

4. Everyone should think of at least one other time in a public place where people stop and do something kind or selfless. Use the example of holding the door open for someone at the bank. Some other answers might be: helping someone with heavy shopping, holding the bus for someone, picking up and giving back something that someone’s dropped, giving up your seat to someone who needs it on the train.
5. The person leading the activity should give out the ‘Qualities of a helper’ cards to each group. The groups should try to arrange the cards so that the most important qualities are at the top and the least important at the bottom. Make clear that there’s no right or wrong answer.
6. The person leading the activity should play some of the first aid scenarios they loaded up earlier. Let the group decide which ones they want to watch – see if anyone has ever seen anything like this happen themselves. Switch to the ‘Educator Zone’ tab and let the group choose some guides, role plays or resources that they’d like to look at.

From here, you could have the group practice and perform a role play demonstration of what they’d do in one of the scenarios. They could take away a resource (if you can print) and do research of their own. Groups could use a guide to learn the steps of a first aid skill and then teach other groups that skill.