We hoped to develop skills in resourcing and resilience building, to address the current socio/economic climate in Czech Republic. Our ultimate aim is to bring about social cohesion and have realised that change must happen in the wider community, through a process of collective resilience building. We felt that the activities proposed in this project would provide us with innovative methodologies and educational content to help us implement this work at both national and European level. Furthermore, we wanted to develop educational programs designed to challenge racial bias and dicrimination, which is an urgent problem in Czech Republic and one which affected our service users disproportionately. A report that Harvard University published in 2017 showed that people in the Czech Republic show the highest level of racial bias in all European countries. We identified an urgent need to address high levels of staff burn-out and exhaustion, by enabling staff to be resourced with the expertise and tools necessary to provide for the wellbeing of others. We are planning to extend our support and mentorship to communities at the intersection of social exclusion and environmental justice and so needed to build our skills in this area.
Established in 2011 in Brno, Narativ was founded by a group of social workers and mental health professionals to share collaborative practices across the Czech Republic. We are now a thriving network of specialist educators. Our work takes us into informal & formal learning environments in a wide range of sectors: from active citizenship to social work, education, therapy & research. Together with diverse organisations and trainers we educate to increase tolerance, develop intercultural understanding and social cohesion. We use education to develop collaboration across various fields of human and social related practice, targeting groups at risk of social exclusion (which include refugees, people experiencing homlessnes, unemployment and complex mental health needs). We have observed increased levels of stress and anxiety amongst our staff and people from organisations that we support. We have also noticed a similar increase among our service users. This project felt like it would equip our staff with relevant, cutting-edge research-based tools and methodologies. Enabling them to support learners in resilience building , leading to a reduction in stress and an increase in cohesion.