Concomitentes launches the ‘Mental Care Programme for Cultural Mediation’.’
The initiative will include a voucher of individualised psychology sessions for the organisation's team; an annual collective self-care session; the publication of the ‘Guide for a nice treatment’, with lessons to share with the project's collaborators; and a ‘Work climate survey’ in 2027.
At Concomitentes we are aware that we must take care of the long-term mediation projects we develop and at the same time we must also take care of ourselves. For this reason, we promote the ‘Mental care programme for cultural mediation’.’, The aim is to help the mediation team and the Concomitentes staff to guarantee emotional wellbeing in the work they carry out at the organisation.
Participatory processes involve negotiations, debates, doubts and few certainties. Along the way, there are many people to talk to and a wide variety of desires and expectations that are generated. The role of cultural mediation has to attend to all of this, being a constant listener in which a balance between desires and possibilities has to be maintained. Each person who participates is a world, with their own ways of doing things, their own time, their own material resources and their own dreams. Mediation, the figure who facilitates these encounters and makes the process possible, sometimes faces a certain loneliness.
Thus, this programme, which also seeks to inspire other projects to take care of the professionals and mediators who carry out their processes, will include:
- Annual voucher for one-to-one psychology sessions for each active mediator throughout a concomitance (the participatory artistic process) and for the staff of the technical team of the organisation.
- A annual collective self-care session in which to share doubts, fatigue and mutual support in order to be able to sustain the processes with greater care.
- Publication in the first half of 2024 of a ‘A Guide to Nice Treatment’, The aim is to share it among the agents that form part of the Concomitentes ecosystem (communities, mediators, artists, technical team), and thus contribute to the definition of complicit languages, generate safe encounters, attend to diversity from the joy of difference, among other challenges.
- In addition, by 2027, it is planned to carry out a ‘Work climate survey’ with the aim of addressing possible improvements in order to achieve a space for work and collaboration that guarantees common well-being.
This first programme is a pilot project that aims to put mental health care into practice, on the understanding that it is necessary to achieve, as far as possible, the fullest possible life.
From Concomitentes we encourage other institutions to take into account the mental health of their staff, because we often forget that, when sharing processes with many people, at the same time as it excites, it also wears out and we must help to prevent this from becoming entrenched or causing future discomfort that affects the project but, above all, the human network that sustains them.
