I am one of the alumni of Roots for Reconciliation project Peace Work Institute and I had a great opportunity to share the experience and knowledge I got during my participation in the project during the last years. So, here I am in the Ukraine. I was invited by my Ukrainian friends to be one of the trainers in the peace project called "Path to peace" taking place in Truskavets, Ukraine on the 24-29th of October, 2015.
The project brought together 29 participants from 7 different local Ukrainian YMCAs. The main idea of the project was to bring together young people from different cities of the Ukraine to work with the people who were internally displaced from their hometowns and now live in those cities and to implement mini-projects in their local communities and YMCAs together. My part of the training was to present the "Do No Harm" methodology – the conflict sensitive approach.
So we started our project with "get to know each other" games, then we went on with team-building activities. The second day was devoted to music as a connector in the conflict situations. During the next 2 days the participants had an opportunity to get acquainted with the "Do No Harm" methodology which is used in projects implemented in the conflict situations. The session started with a short introduction of the history and the main idea how "Do No Harm" work and its main steps which was followed by small-group work. The participants studied and discussed the prepared case, answered the questions about connectors, dividers, basic components of the given project. Then big group discussions were held about the case and introduction of their small-group discussions. The next step was the discussion of the connectors and dividers of the group itself as youth of the country, as representatives of different YMCAs and then the introduction of the "Do No Harm" matrix was done. Afterwards, the local organizations representatives were asked to analyze their context of conflict, to find out connectors and dividers for their local group and compose their own matrix for their future projects.
The next phase of the training was about project management and the participants were asked to find out what kind of projects can be done in their cities and YMCAs in the frames of this project. Participants had great ideas and project proposals, which were discussed by the whole group.
The feedback from the participants received after every day from "home group" discussions as well as the evaluation of the whole project done at the end of the week, showed that we succeeded and reached the goals of the project in this stage.
And now after a great week together with a lot of fun, interesting meetings, discussions we are looking forward for the projects to be implemented in seven different local organizations and cities.