By Georgia Gill | Admin Assistant
As we welcome the new year, we've been reflecting on 2023 and the work that your donations have facilitated.
In late December, we finalised our work on our online series on Self-Forgiveness, which ran during spring and summer of last year. Hosted by our Programme Development Lead, Sandra Barefoot, in conversation with our storytellers, this series offered us our first chance to self-forgiveness and the uncomfortable ambiguities and complexities that make it so very difficult. What this series taught us is that forgiving ourselves is so often entrenched in our connections with others. As Sandra summarises in her blog piece, trauma and shame is relational - it is in this place of the internal sense of self and the external gaze of others where we find a deep sense of wrongdoing.
We have since released these conversations as part of a larger creative writing workshop: This resource invites participants to reflect on a series of prompts around processes of making meaning as a way of supporting self-forgiveness and reconciliation. These workshops are available for purchase via our website.
In the closing months of last year we shifted our focus to the horrific ongoing violence occurring between Israel and Palestine: In late November, and alongside Israeli-Palestinian Families for Peace, our Founder, Marina Cantacuzino, chaired a conversation between storyteller Robi Damelin, an Israeli who lost her son as the result of the decades-long conflict, and Mohamed Abu Jafar of Palestine, who lost his brother due to the occupation. This meeting was followed by the 'Burning Bridges, Together for Humanity' vigil in London, at which Robi also spoke. You can read Marina's reflections on these events here.
In December we hosted an online webinar, also hosted by Marina and featuring Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan of the Parents Circle Families Forum. Here, Bassam, who became involved in the Palestinian struggle as a young boy, then lost his ten-year-old daughter to a member of the Israeli border police, and Rami, an Israeli man whose 14-year-old daughter was a victim of a suicide bombing, discussed how we might harness hope and hold onto humanity as the ongoing devastation intensifies global divisions. Due to the positive reception to this event, we are anticipating its release to the wider public within the coming weeks.
As we enter 2024, we are gearing up for more work and new changes, for which we are incredibly enthusiastic! We thank you for your support for The Forgiveness Project throughout the past year – we couldn’t do this work without you.
By Georgia Gill | Admin Assistant
By Rachel Bird | Director
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