From our experience as human workers we clearly understand how difficult our work is sometimes. This is the reason we
decided to carry out this project. Dealing with constant situations that involve social discrimination and discomfort, people
with fewer opportunities of any kind including disability can cause stress, fatigue, and finally burnout syndrome. Over time
we have learned that we can react to these by various means. One of the objectives of the project is to focus on the
psychophysical health of the "human workers"; as we believe it is an often an underestimated aspect. Social work is a kind
of vocation but you can’t think that those who do it should be a Super Hero. Starting from this awareness we decided to
develop a program of activities that allows participants to explore different artistic ways of facilitation that we consider useful
to regain balance and deal with the work in a productive way as well as preserving our empathy. The planned activities aim
at sharing tools, techniques and experiences that can be useful to other young workers to improve their professional and
personal condition, positively influencing the organizations in which they work and the people that taking part in the services
offeres. For example, through finclusive juggling workshops, visual arts, photography and storytelling, we intend to share
with participants the healing value of the arts in a mindful way. These workshops have the dual objective of restoring the
balance of the participants through access to the “state of flow” and giving them the tools to reuse them in their work. All
activities aim at the re-discovery of personal resources and the awareness of one’s emotional state in order to re-establish
balance where necessary, or increase one’s abilities to achieve better results in the workplace and in society.
Each technique used during the activities of the project also wants to be a starting point to create new laboratories based on
the characteristics of the participants and their life and work experiences.
What we aspire to is, therefore, to be able to help the growth of other young workers who dedicate their lives to social
activities, aware of what they encounter every day and the fundamental role they can play in the world.


The activities we plan to carry out are mainly based on the desire to create a space/ time dedicated to the care of the
person. Anyone who works in a social context, in contact with discomfort, disability, illness and education, needs to stay
connected to their resources in order not to fall into burnout syndrome or indifference to pain. Our first-hand experience has
taught us that there are various methods to overcome this and everyone works on being able to understand their
psychological state and regain balance and centering. The practice that we want to explore together with the other
participants uses different artistic mediators such as Photography, Storytelling, Functional Juggling and Visual Arts. These
mediators have great potential and what we want is to share this awareness with other people who may need it in their
personal and professional lives. Through experiential, non-formal and formal learning we intend to share what we have
learned about it over time and experience.
Human Mandala: Exploring traces of art to discover body emotions” wishes to bring together 18 "human workers", youth
workers and social artists, from 6 countries, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Turkey, that plan to meet in
Benevento of South Italy from 11 to 18 of September 2022 to give them the chance to participate in activities of "Experiential
Learning" also known as "Learning by doing". Our approach divides to “Expert to Learner “ where trainers are setting the
experiences for the participants to transfer to them specific knowledge and tools and “Peer Education” where the trainers
are facilitators and just supporting the participants who set on their own way experiences for the other participants. In some
of the sections we will combine these two different approaches to create something called "cascade methodology" where in
the same section there is transfer of knowledge from expert to participant and then from participant to other participants. We
understand the difficulties of working with people even in the cases of similar or different backgrounds. For this reason, we
identify our “human worker” target group to 3 social categories:
1. Social workers that support individuals and their families through difficult times and try to ensure that vulnerable people,
including children and adults, are safeguarded from harm, those that they see their role as to help improve outcomes in
people’s lives and act as guides and advocates for social change. We picked them as our target group since they
sometimes need to use their professional judgment to make tough decisions that might not always be well received by those
they are trying to help.
2. Youth workers who plan, organise and oversee community programmes aimed at young people, especially youth workers
that work directly with children and young people, helping them to build life skills, develop healthy relationships and make
decisions that are right for them by mentoring or counselling. We chose them as our target group since they sometimes face
challenges especially in they work in difficult social contexts or are dealing with people with fewer opportunities.
3. Social artists who use their creative skills to work with people or organizations in their community to affect change. While
a traditional artist uses their creative skills to express their take on the world, a social artist puts their skills to use to help
promote and improve communities and this can be an exhausting work. We decided to include them in our target group