Re-Peace Peacekeeping Training Session organized by YMCA Belarus with 21 participants in May, served as a reaction to the needs of leaders and volunteers.

Straight after the first war day in Ukraine, YMCA Belarus faced a situation of full frustration – all planned activities for 2022 became irrelevant and some of them were definitely not conflict-sensitive.

Together with organizational issues and the need to reform plans and activities, each of the leaders and volunteers personally faced the situation of parallel discrimination – from friends, relatives from Ukraine and Europe as the inhabitants of a country-aggressor and from friends, relatives from Russia as a nation which is not ready to be engaged and to support war actively.

YMCA Belarus launched personal one-to-one talks with leaders and volunteers in order to reach a solution that allows them to save the mental health of members and together with it to go on with the activities as a public organization whose main focus is informal education and enlightenment.

The program had 3 parts (2,5 days):

✯ The methodological part: It was based on the manual. They worked with the Peacework Guidebook and CDA Collaborative Learning Projects manuals. The main topics for learning and discussion were peacekeeping, war and peace, conflicts, conflict sensitivity, escalation and violence.

✯ The discussion part: Here they analyzed the context using 3 levels – personal, interpersonal and community levels. As a result created a joint vision of the war context and their role in it.

✯ Social experiment: An extremely long quest with elements of hiking, cycling and orienteering: for more than 12 hours participants were engaged in a quest, the main idea of which was to cope with the task using teamwork in absolutely inconvenient conditions for peaceful communication. Participants in 2 teams were of opposite political views, some tasks made teams choose between food or person, etc. In fact, as a result, even the deep tiredness of participants and muscle pain did not affect the peaceful relations and vice versa making leaders and volunteers more united and tolerant.

Results

• Made short research of relations to the PeaceBuilding topic on three levels:
• What can I do personally?
• What can I do in the community?
• What can I do at the State level?
• Reduced the level of anxiety of leaders and volunteers.
• Obtained new knowledge and skills that are already being applied in practice during the implementation of social projects in the local Ys (Brest, Lida, Minsk).
• Created a joint vision of YMCA Belarus.
• Prepared and facilitated a joint event with YMCA Ukraine to share their vision and discuss the plans for 2022.
• Re-planned activities of YMCA Belarus and change of the focus to peacekeeping and conflict sensitivity.
• Created a secure platform for dialogue, communication and information exchange among leaders and volunteers of YMCA Belarus on Telegram.
• Formulated a list of activities within the Conflict Sensitivity approach