Riverhouse ePress arts4peace - psychosocial healing and art based peacebuilding

AFTAR is an wholistic approach for a personal/collective transformation towards reconciliation and healing

In a four day workshop, AFTAR participants learn and practice arts-based approaches for creating awareness of and building capacity to use arts-based peacebuilding approaches to break cycles (victim/survivor, aggressor/offender) of trauma and violence.

Who should participate in this training workshop:
The workshop is designed for participants with experience working with groups (particularly, conflict resolution, trauma healing, and restorative justice), or in counseling, therapy, coaching, facilitation, mediation or group processing.

Participants should be trainers who work with adults and teens in first and second stage trauma from conflicting communities, post-disaster zones, justice system and restorative justice settings, peacebuilding and development settings, or spiritual and religious settings.

The workshop is most effective for participants who are aware of and committed to their own healing journey. Participants are given opportunity to experience the process in the context of their own life experience, test concepts and activities against their own inner response, and then reflect on how to incorporate learnings into their work. Workshops are limited to 15-20 spots.

Components of the workshop:
AFTAR draws heavily on day-to-day stories and characters from participants’ lives to create a rich, reality-focused environment for learning about the cyclic dynamics of trauma and violence and how to break free from them. Into the colorful tapestry of participants’ lived experience we weave peacebuilding ideas and concepts from the following areas:

Cycle of Violence Model. The workshop is built around a model for understanding what happens to traumatized people and societies and what needs to take place to break the cycle of violence. The model incorporates learnings from the fields of trauma healing (body, mind, spirit), restorative justice, spirituality and peacebuilding.
Arts. We use drama, visual arts and music as experiential learning tools adaptable to many settings.
Group Facilitation. We use and review skills and approaches for dealing with the emotions that arise in groups working with trauma/conflict. Participants also learn tools for group reflection processes.
Strategic Capacity-Building. We explore ways to use the model so as to reach as many people as possible in different settings.

Why an arts-based approach?
Training institutions worldwide are increasingly turning to the use of the arts to awaken emotional awareness and engage participants in a creative learning process, about themselves and their communities. “Arts-based peacebuilding" involves more than art as classically understood. It means use of wholistic ways of expressing the trauma/conflict, the narrative and history, and possibilities for new responses. Body, mind, heart, and spirit are called upon to express and explore the impact of the past on the present and find paths to a hopeful future.

An arts-based approach is empowering. Because participants in AFTAR are constantly expressing themselves as they learn, they find their own “voice” and learn in their own “language”. Attention and cooperation are high because participants learn through their own personal process.

An arts-based approach is particularly effective in facilitating change and deep growth. In moving beyond the grip of conflict and trauma, people need to experience a transformational shift. This requires going deeper than the cognitive and allowing something new to emerge, both within and between Individuals.

In group conflicts, people cling to narratives full of memories about past injustices. With others from their own group, they carry a collective consciousness about inequalities and traumas involving the other side. To be successful peacebuilding activities must go to the core of these narratives and transform the mindset in order to make room for the other side’s narrative.

In arts-based training workshops, participants’ stories are brought into the heart of the learning and awareness process. Through personal reflection, artistic representation and re-enactment, and group dialogue, participants have opportunity to develop empathy for others and begin to break down negative stereotypes, misperceptions and prejudices that affect the whole community

The goals of this training workshop are:

To provide participants with a conceptual model that enables them to better understand the cycle of trauma (victim/survivor and/or aggressor/offender) and how to develop strategies to break that cycle.
To deepen understanding of the effect of trauma on individuals and communities at emotional, physical and spiritual levels.
To increase awareness of how cycles of aggression and trauma relate to conflict, often as unrecognized root causes.
To expand skills for assisting others to find healing paths after a trauma, specifically through techniques of expressive arts (visualization, music, image theatre, etc.).
To have workshop participants learn self-care techniques to sustain themselves while supporting others

For further information please write me: odelya@riverhouseepress.com