Pokrovsk community from Donetsk Oblast takes part in the Healing Communities Program

The training course and psychological rehabilitation of the participants are made possible by the Patriarchal Foundation Mudra Sprava and the Renovabis Charitable Foundation.

“We have reached a kind of equator — the fifth round of the Healing Communities Program. There were 30 participants from the Pokrovsk community, who live near the frontline and often experience shelling. This trip gave them the opportunity to relax and refocus. When they arrived, they all wanted to take a break from the constant air raid alarms. However, they remain closely united around the desire for a better life for their home community. Each participant seeks to contribute to the victory,” says Fr Lyubomyr Yavorskyy, Patriarchal Econom of the UGCC and Director of the Patriarchal Foundation Mudra Sprava.

Андрій Рождественський

Andriy Rozhdestvenskyi, a lecturer of the leadership block and executive director of the UCU Leadership Center, points out that this program would be relevant for every community in Ukraine. “This program allows to systematise knowledge and one’s own life experience in order to understand how I can become stronger and more resilient. This is necessary to continue creating, earning money, fighting, working in the civil service, doing all the things that we do in our daily activities, but considering this intense pressure that we have because of the war with Russia. So, this program allows to systematise our knowledge about finding these resources and even to restore this resource, because people go to Lviv to participate in this program, which is still more or less safe. We know that there are no safe places in Ukraine, but Lviv is much safer than Pokrovsk. Therefore, people can relax, rethink, learn, see other people, meet, strengthen their social ties and, of course, gain knowledge,” he shares his observations.

According to him, the importance of the Healing Communities Program lies in four aspects: “Firstly, it is important to go somewhere away from your permanent place of residence just to change the picture. Second, you need to systematise your knowledge and your experience, which are aimed at strengthening your own personal resilience and the resilience of the community. Thirdly, it is an opportunity to strengthen your social ties in the community in a completely different environment. And, of course, what is happening here in the classroom is only a pre-condition for creating a community development strategy in the frontline or de-occupied territory. Therefore, the training should be followed by some concrete actions from the community.”

Olena Olekhnovych, Head of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Protection of Cultural Heritage of the Pokrovsk City Council, shared her impressions: “The new, high-quality, useful and practical knowledge and skills in psychology were extremely interesting. For me personally, the most interesting skill was recovery. We were taught to apply certain things that can help us recover. On the one hand, these are extremely simple and everyday things, but they were laid out very well for us in a methodological way, so now we can use them in difficult moments.”