Dear Donors and Supporters
This is our second progress report for 2024
We keep on meeting two main challenges regarding our refugee work which concerns two groups of people who urgently need support through our programmes
- refugees from Ukraine who had to leave their country after the military invasion of Russian troops and an ongoing war in their country
- the still not ending stream of refugess from Africa and the Middle East
During the past months we have been mainly working on our two year project co-funded by the European Union for our HRE programme with which we are not only providing urgently needed trauma relief and re-empowerment for Ukrainian refugees, but also at the same time want to show with an accompanying research that with our programme we can economically and capacity-wise avoid an already building congestion of the mental health system in the EU countries. 80% will be covered by EU funds and still 20% (about 130,000 EUR) will need to be covered by funds still to be raised. So further and generous support is very much needed.
The project runs under the name "Peace of Mind and Strength of Heart". Our project website is https://pmsh.iahv-peace.org
Our project started on the 1st of December 2022 and meanwhile we have already completed the 2nd year.
However, we have extended the project by two more months until 31-Jan-2025.
We want to touch about 7,000 people during the now 22 months of the project which about 4,000 of them being adults.
Our programs also contain special trainings for young adults (age 13-17) and we plan to run such trainings for about 3,000 people.
We have now completed 124 workshops in different locations in Germany (Rosenheim, Munich, Worms, Mannheim, Hamburg, Chemnitz, Cologne, Bonn, Frankfurt, Dresden, Düren, Marburg, Bremen, Traunreut, Heidelberg) with a few workshops specially designed for children age 6-11 and reached 1,150 refugees as a whole.
We have also created 25 new Ukrainian trainers for our HRE workshop (ToT - training of trainers) in the past year who are now active in Germany and Ukraine.
We have attached an overview about the training and participant numbers.
The work is further supported by a two-month follow-up period per training allowing for sustainability.
In the next report we will be able to share a video covering the results of the project acroos all the participating countries: Germany, Lithuania, Poland.
Even though the EU co-sponsered part of our activities will come to an end by end of January 2025, we will continue our trauma relief work with our powerful tools - the HRE workshops and programs. And not only with Ukrainian refugees but refugees all origin.
Worshop participants report directly noticeable effects like reduced anxiety, capacity to sleep again, more self-confidence etc.
The different percentages of improvement for different factors of live quality range between 71% and 87% - and a 100% recommendation rate by the participants.
So far the news.
Again a BIG THANK YOU for all your support !!
We will keep you posted on further developments.
We look forward to your ongoing support and would appreciate if you also continued talking to families and friends about our project to spread awareness of this important matter.
Best regards
IAHV HRE Germany Team
