Local events – Power. Peace. Poetry. Women's Perspectives on Society's Divisions

Each partner organisation invited to local events in order to disseminate the European cooperation and its results. According to the Corona regulations of the respective country, this was only possible to a limited extent for some until May/June 2022.

Colleagues from all six partners worked together with its local learners on the joint collage and thus not only presented the project but directly involved local participants. The Irish partner organisation KWTB also organised a workshop on story writing (free-style story chain) and public spaces with learners from their organisation. In addition, they tested the exercise on needs and strategies (see “Instead of a guideline“).

On their online event “MAKING A STORY CHAIN” they wrote:

„We recently met online to write our part of the Story Chain project as part of Women’s Perspectives Erasmus project. We used a traditional Haiku structure as a way of taking our view of the physical world and seeing and expressing something deeper, facilitated by Stefanie Larkin as follows:

First, we did a grounding practice, a resting point to be in the moment.
We did a Word Association practice where started from the last two lines of the previous group and continued free writing a list of words for 3 minutes without stopping.
Taking our chain of words, we composed a Haiku-like structured poem. We worked with the first word and the last word in our chain as inspiration in composing the poem, using other words that emerged in the word chain to complete the Haiku. We limit the number of words used to stop words overpowering our experience.
Finally, we used Jamboard to order the poems into one shared piece.
A Haiku is a Japanese poem that contains 17 syllables in a three-line 5-7-5 syllable pattern.
Matsuo Basho is a famous Japanese poet. His writing “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” is the most well-known collection in Japan.“

(Facebook post KWTB Ireland, 15.06.2021)

The Irish colleagues called their collage „feminage“: “Women’s Perspectives workshop in Naas was a great success. The group of women came together to explore and share their experiences of being a woman today. They created something called a ‘feminage’ which frames collage as a feminist art practice of resistance.” (FB-Post, 10.08.2021)

The Polish colleagues from the organisation “To The Future” invited participants (volunteers, visitors) to an evening on 04.12.2021 to talk about “public spaces”. They invited interested women from the city of Wroclaw and refugees from Ukraine to another event on 08.08.2022. See:

During this event, our trainers carried out integration games, and group activities and we talked about values and attitudes such as courage, wisdom, creativity, and also responsibility.

The aim of the meeting was to integrate families, as most of our participants were mothers with children. To show ways to combat loneliness, and to show new perspectives for personal and social development that can be used, for example through participation in the Erasmus plus adult education program.

This community meeting was part of an international Erasmus plus project in which To The Future foundation is involved together with partners from Estonia, Germany, Ireland, France, and Warsaw.

This meeting was to introduce the methods and tools for educators to work with local communities, which we use and learn about during our project.

So far, meetings have been held for educators and participants in our activities in Berlin and Tallinn, and for educators themselves in Warsaw and Dublin.

For us educators, it is very important to have support from more experienced partners concerning working with migrants in the context of the war in Ukraine.

(Facebook-Post, 08.08.2022)

The French project partners worked on the collage in March 2021 with participants from the organisation’s environment (FB, 06.03.2021). In November 2022, they presented their project results to a wider public:

Atelier sur “Les femmes dans l’espace public” réalisée dans le contexte du projet “Power Peace Poetry. Women’s perspectives on society’s divisions”, le 30 novembre dernier. L’objectif du projet est de partager à travers des activités locales et internationales des outils et des méthodes pédagogiques pour donner voix aux femmes et à leurs histoires et perspectives. (FB-Post from 07/12/22)

The Polish organisation BORIS organised a second event in November 2022 to inform about the project results. This time, the colleagues went to those they want to reach: to the KGW organisation in Goszczyn.

In June 2021, the Berlin organisation invited men and women to express their feelings, thoughts, dreams, hopes, worries and questions visually and experimentally through collage techniques with a view to the current (Corona) situation in Europe and the Middle East. Among the participants were also migrants from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. For them, this creative approach was somewhat unusual. But they participated. During the DIALOG café on 1 November 2022, the project results were presented. The participants’ attention quickly turned to public spaces and how differently they can be perceived by women or men.