Learning from Experience

Photo: © 2015, Peace Dialogue, Systemization of Experience Workshop. Author: Armine Zakaryan.

“I want to understand this process as deeply as possible. I know what I am going to do for the next workshop and how I will prepare for it. It is wonderful that I had a chance to be here because without this experience I would not be able to understand and evaluate the project that I am working on now as well as I now can. By the way, this is not the first project I have participated in. I have been involved in this area for many years, however every time we saw that somethings were not successful while others were and if they were not successful we never had the tools to think deeper about why these things did not go the way we wanted.”- said one of the Georgian participants Tsitsino.

From May 8-15, 2015 fifteen participants representing the Russian Federation, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan were invited to take part in a Systemization of Experience Workshop in Tbilisi, Georgia. This was the first workshop organized within the framework of a three year-project called Arena: Community Theatre and Public Art which was launched in 2015 and being implemented by Peace Dialogue NGO and its German partner OWEN. The trainers of the workshop were Marina Grasse and Mirella Galbiati.

The project aims at creating a network of civil society representatives and independent artists from the above mentioned countries. According to the project team, the members of the network will be given an opportunity to gain knowledge about the systemization of experience method and to then develop a common strategy in order to be able to improve the effectiveness of their work in human rights and peace building through artistic means.

Each participant arrived with his or her own expectations: some participants were hoping to meet organizations and individuals who also work on peace building and to share with their experience; some others were interested in a specific component of the project that is connected with the theatre of the oppressed and there were those who believed that the skills related to systemization will enable them to more effectively plan r their organization’s and their activities.

The opinions and impressions the participants shared at the end of the workshop show that the lessons learned from their work are very individual. The participants talked about their interest in the project and their readiness to continue to work and learn together.

The trainers tried to make the impact of external changes on the implementations of current projects more visible and showed how the changes in the political situations or escalations of conflicts affect the project activities, and what measures could be taken to reduce the effects of these external factors. The participants were guided to view all of these factors through the analysis of their own experience.

In order to prepare for the upcoming workshop in August the participants were asked to document a project on human rights and peace building that they will be involved in. The results will be analyzed during the workshop and we will update you here

For more details you can apply to Peace Dialogue NGO at [email protected]

The Project՚s German Partner – OWEN – Mobile Akademie für Geschlechterdemokratie und Friedensförderung e.V.

The project “Arena: Community Theater and Public Art” is supported by the zivik(Civil Conflict Resolution) programme of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) with means from the German Federal Foreign Office.