This workshop will take a deep dive into the connection between peacebuilding and psychosocial support by introducing a groundbreaking intervention toolkit developed for that purpose.
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- Develop an understanding of the intersection between peacebuilding, non-violent approaches, and psychosocial support (PSS).
- Explore an innovative intervention toolkit designed for children, and appreciate the role of storytelling and experiential learning in child learning.
- Recognize the importance of integrating essential life skills—such as peacebuilding and psychosocial support—at an early age.
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Psychosocial support (PSS) specialists, officers, and facilitators; conflict resolution practitioners; professionals in the NGO and humanitarian sectors working with children, either directly or indirectly; as well as members of the general public with an interest in these issues and in child-focused interventions.
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- Provide them with novel ideas on cutting-edge practices in this field.
Course Content
Organisation
Mental Health Services
Presenter
May Aoun is the Global Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) Advisor at Save the Children, based in Beirut, Lebanon. She is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist by training, and a senior mental health professional with extensive global experience in program development and implementation, mentoring, training, research, and clinical service delivery.
May has significant experience working in humanitarian contexts, with a particular focus on integrating MHPSS into child protection, education, health, nutrition, and youth programming. She has collaborated on multiple global MHPSS research initiatives, including a randomized controlled trial of the WHO’s scalable psychological intervention for adolescents (EASE), and the EQUIP project—an effort to validate competency assessment tools that ensure helpers delivering brief psychological interventions or psychosocial support meet minimum standards of practice.
She is the author of several psychosocial and paraprofessional counseling interventions for children and youth, successfully implemented in the Middle East and beyond. May holds advanced degrees in clinical psychology as well as psychosocial support and peacebuilding
Oussama Safa is a dispute resolution professional who specializes in negotiation, mediation, facilitation and peacebuilding processes. He has more than 30 years of experience working on four different continents with a wide range of audiences and stakeholders. He has led mediated interventions, designed and facilitated dialogue processes and provided strategic negotiation advice and hands-on training and capacity building in different conflict settings ranging from civil wars, constitutional reforms, labor disputes, peacekeeping, democratic transitions and judicial reforms, among others. Mr. Safa was also the director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, a Beirut-based think-tank working on public policies, governance, democratic elections, peacebuilding and development in Lebanon and the Middle East and North Africa Region. He has vast experience in policy research, advocacy and capacity building; he is also a visiting lecturer, since 2004, in the master’s program in Human Rights and Conflict Management at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa; he has also lectured at the Université Saint-Jospeh and the Lebanese University, both in Beirut. Mr. Safa is co-author of The Little Fellow: Guidelines for Happier Living, Life Skills Training Manual for Children (2015). He holds graduate degrees in international affairs and international development from The American University, Wahington, DC and an undergraduate in political science from the American University of Beirut.
