Tony Koutsoumbos – Making safe spaces for debate

Tony Koutsoumbos is the founder of Debating London, a debate club for adults, and the Debating Foundation, an education charity for young people and marginalised communities. In 2013, Tony led a team of debate trainers to Rwanda to help a new advocacy charity host their first ever debate camp, bringing together teenagers from dozens of schools across the country’s capital, Kigali. The most rewarding part of this eye-opening experience has been learning how his students have applied their debating skills in wider civil society. This in turn has exposed him to a very different perspective on the boundaries of free speech, in a country still escaping the shadow of the 1994 genocide; a lesson that could prove instructive and helpful in resolving heated debates here in the UK on their boundaries on university campuses.
Such was its success, he and his team returned the following year to an even larger camp with students attending from as far afield as Kenya. In 2015, the students became the teachers and designed their own programme, boldly titled ‘The Dreamers Academy’.