HOW DID WE START WORKING IN PEACEBUILDING?

The first project in this direction was the ‘Creators of Concord’ training project for Ukrainian teachers, which the Power of the Future NGO began implementing in 2018, working closely with the Civil Peace Service, funded by the German Federal Government. The goal of the project's authors, Svitlana Lukyanchenko and Roman Kandybur, was to teach teachers how to create a positive and non-violent atmosphere at school and provide them with tools for creative conflict resolution.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the NGO ‘Power of the Future’ has expanded its activities and introduced the Contact2U project, covering new segments of the target audience, namely representatives of IDPs who came to Dnipro and the region as a result of the hostilities and representatives of local communities. 

WHAT IS THE SPECIFICITY OF THE CONTACT2U PROJECT?

The idea of the project is to help IDPs in the process of integrating into a new environment. Through socio-cultural events, such as networking, art therapy workshops and psychological support, the project aims to help participants feel comfortable in their new place, overcome anxiety and uncertainty.

The project is based on the latest approach to organising events - Community based social healing - healing the community through social art (namely, playback theatre performances). The main focus of this approach is to create a supportive community of like-minded people that helps people cope with stress and start a new life.

HOW DID WE GET TO THE PEACE FORUM?

Since 2018, the Paris Peace Forum has been a platform where heads of state and international organisations work together with civil society and the private sector to create new forms of collective action and is, without exaggeration, a unique event in the field of peacebuilding.

We understood better than anyone that one of the global challenges of our time is to find mechanisms to support people suffering from prolonged war, as well as to restore their mental health and psycho-emotional state. And the Contact2U project had specific solutions that our team was ready to share with the whole world and offer a programme for healing war-traumatised communities and overcoming the polarisation of society, which had already been successfully implemented in several cities with Ukrainian refugees and IDPs, people traumatised by war. Therefore, in close cooperation with the experts of the Civil Peace Service, we created and submitted an application for participation in the forum.

In the application, we outlined the essence of the project and clearly expressed our desire to scale our experience to many public sector organisations around the world. We declared our readiness to share the best practices of social healing of communities, to talk about the tools of social art: playback theatre, art techniques that we use. After all, our main goal is to help war-traumatised communities become more powerful and enable community members to support each other.

We also outlined key steps for the next 12 months:● Description and systematisation of the knowledge and practices gained over the 8-year period of our work.
● Dissemination of experience at global conferences and forums working with community development.
● Preparation and publication of a brochure with the best international practices of psycho-emotional support for communities traumatised by war.
● Uniting organisations working in similar approaches around the world, creating a common platform for their communication, holding online meetings, and later organising study visits to each other.
As a result, our Contact2U project became one of 50 projects from around the world that were selected and invited to Paris to present their ideas at the 6th Peace Forum. It was a great honour for us to be the only project representing Ukraine and the Ukrainian experience at such a respected global forum. We are glad that we were able to talk about the events in our country and how people are experiencing them, and to offer tools for social healing and support for Ukrainian communities. It is very important for us to share our experience with other countries, to declare Ukraine to the world and make this world a better and safer place.