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Research and development activities

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“Community Based Social Healing approach”The work of the research group of the NGO "Power of the Future"

For a long time, the Power of the Future NGO has been researching the practices we use in our work and the technologies that can unite and heal communities.
This approach is called Community Based Social Healing.

Social healing in the community

restoration of traumatized integrity in interdependence
collective unity and individual identity. A holistic understanding of community as the primary
means and goal of healing ensures the creation of safe and supportive spaces for self-expression, interaction and acceptance of differences that lead to the stability and fullness of a shared way of life.

What is the difference between this approach and others?

Social healing in the community is a process of healing, restoring the psycho-emotional stability of community members through various joint supportive activities and practices. an important feature of this approach is that a person not only attends individual events, but also becomes part of a community - a group of people with common values, people who support each other. This is a process where healing involves not individual specialists or psychologists, but rather the creation of a space, an atmosphere where the community itself is a tool for healing.

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 Initially, we, as practitioners, used creative methods in this process, such as playback theater, drum circle, singing circle, and various forms of facilitation. Then, thanks to the Artists of Consent project, we began to explore conflictology, various practices of non-violent communication, meditation, and mindfulness exercises. This expanded our arsenal of practices for interaction, and we realized how best and what other not only verbal but also social and emotional components of bringing people together through community are available.
We see that only person-to-person support, personal support, as it is done in individual psychological practice, is not always effective, because if a person receives such help in an individual form, he or she still returns to the community, and if this community is not supportive, not ecological, and has traumatic experiences or tension. Then all the efforts made by mental health professionals are still lost.

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Having analyzed how some NGOs and foundations are currently interacting with beneficiaries, as well as the humanitarian response to the full-scale invasion or the invasion back in 2014, we have come to the following conclusion:
Many international and Ukrainian organizations are working on an individual basis. Even if a group approach is used, the issue of adaptation and the formation of a community around a person, where he or she will feel comfortable, where he or she will be able to meet his or her needs, where he or she will have horizontal communication (equal to equal), is not taken into account and is not set as one of the tasks of the activities. Having realized that there is not much expertise, not many people in public organizations understand what Community Based Social Healing is, and having analyzed the world experience, we realized that this approach needs to be spread.

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In August 2023, we launched a research group on the topic "Community Based Social Healing approach".
This research will involve scientists who will study the results we have achieved and the practices we use. They will compare it with other approaches and practices. Also, other organizations that also use this Community Based Social Healing approach, uniting and healing people based on communities in a horizontal approach, will be involved in this research.
At this stage, our researchers are interviewing experts in this approach in Ukraine.
The next stage will be a description of what we know from international experience, what achievements and research have already been made.
This analysis is already underway, and the next step will be to describe our ideology and approaches, interview other organizations, and compare the results.
In the early summer of 2024, we will present the first result in the form of a book or brochure describing the outcome of this analysis.
We are also engaging international expertise: we are studying the experience of our colleagues who create communities in Italy, Lithuania, and Germany. We will be asking how this system works and our approach, which we share with other NGOs, how it works in other cultural environments, whether it is unique, whether it is suitable only for the Ukrainian community, or whether it can be scaled up to the general public.

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WE HAVE A POWERFUL TEAM:

- On the one hand, these are young scholars who know modern approaches in science and are motivated to make a breakthrough in the humanities.
- On the other hand, we have scholars who have been working on this topic for a long time, including sociologists, cultural studies experts, and philosophers,
and there is a public organization called Power of the Future, where specialists actively use such practices as playback theater, drum circle, singing circle, social art practices, facilitation, and group psychology. All this will be researched and described.
Our goal is to formalize the experience in such a way that it can be used by other public organizations, both in Ukraine and abroad, to create supportive communities that can help in the mental and physical healing of the participants involved in these communities.

TEAM MEMBERSHIP:

Svitlana Lukyanchenko - coordinator of the research group, co-founder and deputy chairman of the board of the NGO "Power of the Future", co-author of the book "Creative methods of conflict transformation"

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Motuz Tetiana - scientific supervisor of the research and experimental work on the topic "Development of a model for the implementation of partnership pedagogy based on a competency-based approach in general secondary education institutions of the Dnipro region" for 2023-2026, based on the educational project "Creators of Concord", Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of General and Special Pedagogy of the Dnipro Academy of Continuing Education of the Dnipro Regional Council

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Fanagyi Rostyslav - Master of Cultural Studies, PhD student at the Department of Ethics, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyivhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8640-082X

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Volodymyr Senko - PhD in Political Science, analyst, facilitator, trainer in the field of democracy and human rights.

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Iryna Makarova is a chief analyst at the research company Active Group, a practitioner in the field of qualitative sociological research, co-author and trainer of training games based on the format of organizational and activity games, PhD in Economics.

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OUR ARTICLES ON THE TOPIC:

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Article "Community as a means and goal of healing collective trauma". Fanagei Rostyslav. V International Scientific and Practical Conference "BASICS OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH"
27.10.2023 Zurich, Switzerland

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HROMADA AS A MEANS AND GOAL OF COLLECTIVE TRAUMA HEALING.

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PLAYBACK THEATER AS THE PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIAL HEALING.

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 NARRATIVE RETICULATION — METHOD OF THE COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIAL HEALING.