The event is in the past. On this website we share insights, sparks and follow-up ideas. The offline workshop in July 2025 was facilitated by Collective Care Berlin and organized by Educat Kollektiv. The online workshop in September 2025 was facilitated by Educat Kollektiv and inspired by the offline workshop with Collective Care Berlin.
Here you can find:
- Content
- Workshop Journal – Offline Workshop Berlin
- Skillshare – Body Work
- Sparks and Quotes from the Workshop
- Recording of the shorter Online Workshop
- A Workshop Concept to share in your groups
- Information on the Facilitators
Content
This workshop invited us to explore mental health not as an isolated personal issue, but as something deeply shaped by collective trauma, systemic collapse, and the grief of living in a world marked by violence, genocide, and ecological destruction. We practiced being with discomfort, nurturing collective care, and building emotional resilience that honors the reality of structural harm.
Together, we engaged with frameworks that helped us make sense of oppression and its impacts — while grounding in foundational practices like nervous system regulation, and relational skills such as deep listening and witnessing. We worked with the body as a site of sensing, healing, and transformation—and incorporate moments of creativity, play, and joy as ways to reconnect and reimagine how we live through crisis.
Workshop Journal – offline
We gathered for a powerful workshop with 20 participants on Re-Centering Mental Health in Times of Social Collapse, facilitated by Collective Care Berlin and organized by Educat Kollektiv. We got inputs about how mental distress is not just personal, but rooted in systems of capitalism, colonialism, and oppression. Through a variety of somatic grounding methods, we got individual tools that can help us in times of crisis.
Through exploring witnessing practices and playful connection, we got to know tools to collectively hold pain, joy, and complexity. We challenged the myth of individual pathology and leaned into collective healing and resistance. Deep gratitude to everyone who showed up with courage, curiosity, and care.
Integrated image descriptions for Pictures at the end of the page.
Skillshare – Body work
Stand back-to-back with another person and lean into each other. Feel how you are holding the other person. Feel how you are being held. Connect to those who are not here and have your back so that you can be here today. Connect to those who raised you and came before you. Feel the touch of their backs.
Now, lean a bit forward with your upper body so you stand on your own. Stay connected with the person(s) behind you. Once you are ready, take a conscious step forward. You decide, what quality this step has – fast, slow, long, short, …
Some sparks – Quotes from Facilitators and Participants
Workshop Online – recording (excerpt)
We recorded the input and published it on Youtube. The content is in the English language. On Youtube you can choose English Subtitles with a Click on the Symbol at the bottom saying “CC”
Workshop Concept
From the experiences and content of the online and offline Workshop, we produced a Workshop Concept to share with you and your groups. It contains methods and proposals for timeslots and breaks.
Please address where you got it from, feel free to send us feedback or make your own changes. There is a short version and a longer one. Below the pdf-Reader you can find the Link to download the pdf.
Re-Centering Mental Health in Times of Social Collapse and Multiple Crises – 3 Hours
Re-Centering Mental Health in Times of Social Collapse and Multiple Crises – 7 Hours
Facilitators
COLLECTIVE CARE BERLIN // citizenslab.eu
Alice Priori
Alice is a community and process facilitator, Art of Hosting practitioner, activist, and dancer. She is the co-founder and coordinator of CitizensLab e.V., a Berlin-based organization driving deep systemic change across Europe. Working at the intersection of activism, societal transformation, and experiential learning, Alice supports groups, collectives, and artistic residencies in co-creating regenerative and just systems. Her work is grounded in collective care, somatics, and deep cultural change, with a strong focus on decolonization, power dynamics, and the commons. She is especially dedicated to collective healing and discovering new forms of democracy as essential practices of care, resistance, and renewal in times of crisis.
Giulia Orlandi
Giulia is an urban planner focused on urban sociology, is deeply involved in social-political processes and regenerative activism. As a part of CitizensLab and in Collective Care Berlin, they explore alternative learning through unlearning. Passionate about creating change and connecting struggles they work to build inclusive and sustainable communities. For the past 7 years they have focused on the political and social dimensions of women or more broadly the LGBTQIA+ community, in Germany and Italy. For at least the past two years, they have also focused much of their training on group facilitation and conflict resolution, basing much of their work on a critique and self-critique approach.
Aleksandra Kulesza
Aleksandra is a political scientist and academic by training. In the past, she conducted research on civil society, the crisis of democracy, and published on the topic of direct democracy. Today, she is an educator, facilitator of social change projects, and a clown who merges the science of social justice, trauma, and play with healing justice and liberation. In her praxis, she focuses on the practical application of political theory in daily life and works towards a cultural reorientation based on deep understanding and collective practice, under the motto: “I am well if you are well, we are well if the earth is well.” She reimagines community care to offer a possibility of shifting our spaces toward connectedness through meaningful rituals of presence and social solidarity. Her work is inspired by Staci Haines. In addition to her involvement with CitizensLab and Collective Care Berlin, she also supports Neue Generation in their efforts to bring citizen assemblies to life.
EDUCAT KOLLEKTIV
Fine
Fine is part of Educat Kollektiv and working from Berlin. For this Workshops Fine provides infrastructure, organisation and moderational support. Fine studied in Dresden and has been working full-time and voluntarily in youth education for many years. Fine holds workshops and seminars that combine methods of group pedagogy and team building with topics from critical education. Fine has also completed training as a trainer for extracurricular educational work and is almost finished with their certified experiential education training. One of the larger projects at Educat: Caring-arts.org <3.
Integrated image description for Pictures on this page:
1: The picture shows the set-up of the room where the workshop took place – an old chapel in Berlin that was never baptized and is now used for community events. On the ground, there are carpets and pillows for people to sit. There is a pinboard with a flipchart with the title of the workshop. On a small platform, there is a variety of stimming tools and teddy bears for comfort and stimming. On the back of the room, where the altar used to be, the presentation of the project in it´s visual design is projected.
2: This is a close-up picture from outside the place with it´s name on a banner: “Kiezkapelle” which translates to neighborhood chapel.
3: There is a group of people sitting in a circle on cushions on the floor. Part of them are participants of the workshop, parts are the facilitators. From what we know from the workshop, many but not all of them were white women and queers from different countries. They all look rather curiously towards something or someone outside of the frame, maybe someone share a story.
4: The picture shows the hands of two people placing their palms facing up, one on top of the other. This must have been during a check in and connection exercise.
5: The picture shows the hands of two people physically conntecting by putting their palms together.
6: The picture shows two of the facilitators, Alice and Giulia, during an input. One of them is standing, one is sitting. Alice is talking about the connection of mental health in times of crisis and injustice. On the flipchart, there is the headline “Colonialism” with two arrows pointing down to “Supremacism” and “Capitalism” with smaller sub-categories which are hard to read. Then there is another arrow pointing to the word “Trauma” and “Inflammation”. This is a wording and concept they took from the book “Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice“ by Rupay Marya and Raj Patel.
7: Two participants are walking closely next to each other in nature. The picture shows their backs. They are surrounded by green from needle trees. This picture was taken during an exercise on co-regulation.
8: A variety of cushions and carpets that are place in a circle are one the floor. There is a glimpse of light shining on them through the windows of the chapel.
9: On a flipchart page with the headline “Inflamed”, there is a simplified drawing of a person that has facial expressions that suggest that they are suffering. It is surrounded by words like colonialism, racism, capitalism, ecocide… Under it there is a table with words in red color that stand for a way of medical treatment of “Quick fix medicine” to health issues that is not favorable according to the authors Rupay Marya and Raj Patel of the book “Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice“. These are: pills, blaming the individual, suppressing symptoms and isolation. On the other side of the table, it includes treatment approaches of “Deep Medicine” that draws from ancestral knowledge, understanding systems, listening to the body and collective care.
10: The picture shows two flipcharts on a pinboard. One of them shows the brave space poem by Beth Strano.
It goes like this: There is no such thing as a “safe space” — We exist in the real world.
We all carry scars and have caused wounds. This space seeks to turn down the volume of the world outside, and amplify voices that have to fight to be heard elsewhere. This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be. But it will be our space together, and we will work on it side by side.
On the second flipchart there is the modell Comfort-Learning-Panic. It says that there is a comfort zone where it feels safe but we do not learn. We learn when we get out of the comfort zone. If we go too far from our comfort zone though, we might reach the panic zone where learning and reflecting is hard, too, as we are busy with struggling to survive.
11. Several feet in socks or barefoot are standing on the carpet. The feet are from people in pairs who stand back-to-back to each other during an exercise that you can interpret being about mutual care. It was about experiencing the feeling of having a back to lean onto while holding someone at the same time.
