Support for Civil Peace Initiatives

A four-day workshop entitled Gender Approach in Community Organizing was held in Zugdidi, Georgia from 9thto 12thof May, 2018. The event was initiated by Tsitsino Shengelia from the Centre for Civic Activism from Zugdidi in the framework of the project “ARENA: Community Theatre and Public Art”.

The group of participants of the four-day school of using video for advocacy consisted mainly of people from Novocherkassk. However, the project team involved several members of the ARENA network from other countries or people who were delegated by the network members.

Noteworthy, that two of the ARENA project participants, Lyubov Martinets from Ukraine and Zulfiya Safkhanova from Azerbaijan, were involved as co-facilitators of the training. The purpose was to further strengthen the regional network and to involve new actors from the mentioned regions. In total 23 participants of different age-groups and professions attended the school. With the support and mentorship of the facilitators and co-facilitators they learned the basic skills of video-making, script writing, video editing, etc.

On March 25 screening of the films, produced under the umbrella of the regional program “ARENA: Community Theatre and Public Art” launched and supported by the “Peace Dialogue” NGO, and a follow up discussion took place in the coffee shop “12 Chairs”. Documentary and animated movies “The Corridor” (director Igrar Gurban, Azerbaijan), “Mark Lvovich Tyulpanov and Others” (director Daria Kavelina, Ukraine), and “Hostility” (director Norayr Hambaryan, Armenia) were shown.

The project “ARENA: Community Theatre and Public Art” was launched in 2015. The project is aimed at improving the impact of peacebuilding efforts by the civil society actors in the conflict affected post-Soviet area. For the last three years, the project initiators, Armenian NGO Peace Dialogue and OWEN e.V. in Germany, support peacebuilding and human rights activists as well as independent artists from the South Caucasus Region, Russian Federation and Ukraine in developing pro-active, art-based strategies and hands-on methodologies for the community-based peacebuilding.

In 2018 the teams in PD and OWEN will strive to support the local groups in implementing activities derived from their strategies, further strengthen the regional network and to involve new actors from the mentioned regions.

December 22, 2017 at the Kyiv office of the Rosa Luxemburg foundation, was the first public screening of an animated film by Dana Kavelina “The Story of Mark Tulip Who Talked to Flowers”.

The ARENA network was established in the framework of the project “ARENA: Community Theatre and Public Art” of Peace Dialogue NGO and its German partner OWEN. The project is aimed at improving the impact of peacebuilding efforts by the civil society actors in the conflict affected post-Soviet area at the grass roots level. In August, 2017 the participants of the network developed a strategy for the ARENA community, consisting of various actions to be implemented in the communities of the network members in the South Caucasus, Russian Federation and Ukraine.

On August 18, 2017 the representatives of the Permanent Mission of Austria to the OSCE hosted the participants of the ARENA Summer School held from 14th to 21st of August, 2017 in the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR). Apart from the representatives of the Permanent Mission of Austria to the OSCE and the Arena network participants, the representatives of the Europe Integration Foreign Affairs Ministry of Republic of Austria and representatives of OSCE delegations from France, Italy and Finland attended the meeting.