The UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative advances community-focused youth-driven Collective Healing Circles (CHCs). The methodological approaches of the CHCs include psycho-social, somatic, collaborative, communal and spiritual. These inform the design and facilitation of experiential workshops that involve people in the community from all backgrounds.
CHC incorporate four processes/modules, mirroring the four components of collective healing, including:
- Exploring our common past & recognising enduring intergenerational legacies and trauma;
- Affirming/restoring human dignity through dialogue and inquiry;
- Reconnecting and nurturing intercommunal relationships;
- Envisioning and activating our shared future(s).
The CHC Programme is designed for a diverse group of 9 to 15 community members. It can be held intensively over 3 days, or more spaciously over 2-3 months. It can be offered as in-person workshops, online, or as hybrid events.
In practice, for these workshops to meet the community’s healing and well-being needs, there will be a series of pre-programme inquiries, trustbuilding and community mapping. These are essential for contextualising, adapting and localising the programme. The CHC itself is characterised by experiential activities such as listening, sharing, remembering, and re-storying to acknowledge legacies of dehumanisation and draw lessons from the past. Remembering/re-storying during the CHC is carried out through intergenerational dialogue and inquiry (IDI). It helps recover and restore wisdom and knowledge of previous generations to benefit the present, and guide the collective journey into better futures.
The presence of youth and elders is the presence of our entire community. IDI allows a shift from our silently living out personal and collective sufferings to hearing and bearing witness of these. When the youth and elder remember collaboratively, they can bond and form a community of memory. Deeply tragic personal and communal stories are no longer dissociated from the continuity of our collective narrative. This can be a healing process not only for the younger generation, but also for the elders who have suffered so profoundly.
The CHC enlarge the circles for relational enrichment and co-creation, including bringing these new narratives and understandings forward to the community through a meeting with diverse stakeholders. Educators, social workers, activists, NGO professionals, business, religious and political leaders, and others will come together to explore the ways that these shifts in consciousness can initiate conversations about social justice, and structural change. Stakeholder meetings offer a public space where everyone can consider their responsibility for supporting systemic transformation necessary for the well-being of all.
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