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New
Projects for 2006
  Komisyon
Fanm Viktim pou Viktim,
Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Haitians living in Port-au-Prince have
experienced unprecedented violence and violations of their rights. The
women victims participating in KOFAVIV (The Commission of Women Victims
for Victims) have not only experienced the trauma of rape, but have
also had husbands, partners, children, or other family members brutally
killed. In this situation of ongoing violence and unrest, many have
lost their means of economic survival and are unable to meet the basic
needs of their families. KOFAVIV provides support to individual victims
of human rights violations and violence while also facilitating healing
processes at a community level. With support from the Martín-Baró Fund,
KOFAVIV will offer twelve peer support groups, of twenty members each,
employing Reflection Circles to encourage non-hierarchical, participatory
interaction and dialogue. KOFAVIV will also hold community Open Space
sessions focusing on the mental health impact of violence on the community.
These will offer a space in which women can reach beyond their peer
groups and discuss the ways violence has affected them. Individuals
from other grassroots organizations will be invited to participate in
these activities.
Renewals
 Asociación
Centro de Educación y Formación Maya Ixil, San Gaspar
de Chajul, Guatemala. The Center for Mayan Ixil Education and Development
works with youth and women in the rural town of Chajul and surrounding
villages. This is an area where the country's thirty-six years of civil
war and entrenched poverty have profoundly affected individual mental
health and community life. The Martín-Baró Fund's support over the past
year enabled ACEFOMI to expand its work to four additional villages,
as well as to increase activities in the town of Chajul itself. They
report that the response of participants in the project over the past
year has been very positive. This year's grant will strengthen the community
impact of the project's work. The women of ACEFOMI will hold four workshops
in each of ten identified indigenous communities. The workshops will
address mental health and human rights issues, discuss the importance
of gender equality, and examine types of organization and leadership
within indigenous communities, as well as specific problems that affect
the community including poverty, youth gangs, and family violence.
 Boarding
School Healing Project,
South Dakota, USA. The Boarding School Healing Project, now in
its second year of MBF funding, seeks to document and raise consciousness
about abuses related to the abduction and forced enrollment of Native
American children in boarding schools - abuses which continued well
into the twentieth century and continue to affect tribal life today.
The project reports that the process of documentation, involving extensive
interviews with community elders who were forced to attend these schools,
has been slower than expected due to the level of trauma experienced
by survivors. However, they hope soon to complete the process on all
reservations in South Dakota. The group also offers individual and group
support on the reservations, as well as workshops and visits to the
boarding schools. This past year they launched a grassroots campaign
pressuring the United Nations to implement its resolution calling for
a study of genocidal practices against indigenous peoples, including
boarding schools. The campaign has allowed them to engage Native communities
in human rights organizing, so that they can understand and shape these
processes. In addition to continuing these programs, with this year's
grant they plan to complete a toolkit for tribal communities seeking
to pursue remedies through tribal court systems.
 Center
for Immigrant Families, New York City, NY, USA. "I
learned how to feel differently about myself and my community," reports
a participant in one of the workshops run by the Center for Immigrant
Families, "to feel proud of being an immigrant, and to feel how strong
you have to be to be an immigrant here." In the past year C4IF has engaged
in outreach to more women in the Lower Manhattan Valley neighborhood
of New York City, resulting in an expansion of their membership as they
continue to work towards the project's mission of promoting psychological
well-being, health, development, and organizing for justice among low-income
immigrant women of color. With this year's grant, C4IF will continue
its outreach, and conduct four community-based workshops on Culture,
Migration, and Community Organizing and Creating Community Literacy.
They will also conduct a four-part leadership training program on community
organizing and popular education for those who have previously participated
in these workshops.
 Centro
Bartolomé de las Casas, The Fund once again renewed its support
of Centro Bartolomé de las Casas, which works with local communities
on economic, social, psychosocial and spiritual development. The Center
reports that they have achieved their primary objective for 2005, which
was to accompany the communities of Arcatao and Nueva Trinidad in exhumation
processes. They have also begun legal negotiations and psychosocial
accompaniment for the exhumation of remains in the riverbed of Río Sumpul,
Chalatenango. The group's staff and volunteers consolidated local initiatives
toward the recovery of historical memory in the north-west of Chalatenango,
incorporating survivors as protagonists in local processes. They have
been invited to Chile and Brazil to share their experiences at international
assemblies on memory and mental health. With this year's grant, the
Center hopes to continue and consolidate their work with a local group
of survivors in the northeast zone and to provide psychosocial support
to relatives and survivors of exhumations slated to occur in October
to December, 2006.
Children's
Rehabilitation Center, Quezon City, Philippines.
In the past year, the Children's Rehabilitation Center has extended
its community-based psychosocial services in the areas of Eastern Visayas,
Southern Tagalog, and Northern Luzon - areas affected by decades of
conflict, poverty, economic displacement, and human rights violations.
They also provided psychosocial, medical, nutritional, and educational
assistance to twenty-one child political prisoners. The programs for
children emphasized play therapy, arts, and cultural performance. CRC
also offered training on the Children's Rights Framework to human rights
workers in Luzon. In addition, they offered counseling for adults, and
encouraged them to find alternative methods to challenge government
policies of terror in their communities. This year's grant will allow
CRC to continue their delivery of services to the displaced families
from the Eastern Visayas region, as well as for the child political
prisoners. In addition, the Center will continue its arts workshops
for children, and its symposia on human rights issues.
 Rwandan
Women's Peace Leadership Project,
Rwanda. Working with Rwandan women, who suffered some of the most
profound physical and psychological effects the country's 1994 genocide,
Pro-Femmes, an umbrella group of 40 Rwandan organizations, has implemented
a project to train staff members to become trainers in conflict resolution
and reconciliation. Last year's grant from the Martín-Baró Fund to the
Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, a non-profit organization based in
the United States, enabled the RWPLP to offer seminars including the
use of inter-communal dialogue and other techniques for rebuilding community
relations and promoting social healing. With this year's grant, the
Karuna Center will be carrying out two additional phases of work with
Pro-femmes. Phase I is the final workshop, to review and consolidate
learning from the two-year training program, while Phase II is designed
to meet the need for further mentoring, through hands-on coaching of
trainees, followed by a meeting of all trainees to discuss the lessons
learned, challenges they are encountering, and ways they can strengthen
themselves as a group of peacebuilders, capable of providing ongoing
mutual support.
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English
to Spanish translations
courtesy
of Melisa Flores
©
2007, Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health & Human Rights
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