When it comes to non-profit organizations making positive impacts in the world, especially in the area of torture prevention, Association for Prevention of Torture (APT) is one of those making the biggest impacts. They are constantly working for a great cause – to prevent torture or ill-treatment in societies.

From a broader perspective, there are government and non-government bodies dealing with the prevention of torture globally. They monitor institutions where one could be held against their will – prison, custody, jail, or mental health institutions. APT is one of the non-governmental organizations working with these bodies to seek solutions to prevent torture and ill-treatment as well as support national efforts to protect persons who are at risk of torture. They provide technical advice, tools, and expertise to enhance the capacities of their partners working at the national level to prevent torture and ill-treatment.

It is on this note that, in 2021, we started our joint effort on APT’s newest project ‘Torture Prevention Learning Village’ – an unconventional approach to education, for people interested in the prevention of torture, guided by its core value of continuous learning and creativity.

Torture Prevention Learning Village is a website and digital learning platform where anyone interested in the subject can build technical capacity to identify and prevent torture.

APT approached us with an ambitious idea. They imagined a campus for both laymen and experts in the field of ill-treatment/torture prevention. Something that will appeal to anyone interested in the subject but be specific enough for people who already work on the prevention of ill-treatment and torture. So, our first step was a discovery phase. Together, we went through several workshops and outlined which features to include in the minimum valuable product (MVP).

The Torture Prevention Learning Village was an ideal solution. It was a leaping point and the first step towards a complete learning management system. We worked on product planning, to decide which initial features will make the Village a comprehensive and intuitive platform.

Their idea only grew from then on. While the Village was open to all, APT wanted to specifically educate those who already work on the prevention of torture. Their next feature was curated towards people in the same field as them.

This is why we created courses for experts.

As a part of those courses, new partner users are onboarded via an invite sent out to interested organizations and their employees. They go through an in-depth course that includes structured lectures and modules with tests, online meetings, and workshops. Depending on their results during the modules, they earn certificates issued by the APT team.

In the near future, the APT team wants to create a virtual community with a space where members of the community can network with others interested in the cause of torture prevention, exchange ideas, share experiences, ask questions and collaborate.

Our work on the Torture Prevention Village was a full-service venture. The Village runs on a custom-developed web that we fully designed and manage content for. The center of the Village is the Campus, dedicated to educating anyone willing to learn.

To create the Campus, we connected Articulate Rise to a homemade and custom-built learning management system and now collect useful information – how much time users spend on the Campus, how successful they are at completing courses, and so on. This helped APT gain around new 200 users in their pilot stages.

Articulate Rise 360 is a web application that makes it possible to create courses in a short amount of time. Because of the technologies that Rise 360 uses, the courses built are fully responsive and adapt to any device.

And this is just the beginning. APT plans to expand their home even more and welcome new learners.