Last year the intercultural city of Lutsk, Ukraine completed its "Animation as an art therapy project", an initiative for internally displaced children and youth. The main objectives of the project was to provide psychological relief and help the youth to cope with the stress and challenges of the current situation in Ukraine. Because creative activities and artistic work in general are known to be effective methods of psychological relief and emotional stabilization, ICC Lutsk teamed up with the local NGO "Imago" to design and implement a series of animation workshops to meet these goals.

What is animation? How to create your own short cartoons and animate characters? How to deal with anxiety, tension and stress through animation and various exercises?

All these and many other questions were answered during the workshops. Under the attentive eye of Imago mentors, participants created their own imaginary intercultural characters by sculpting them out of clay and learned to bring them to life through their own animated videos, in which they expressed their thoughts, opinions, emotions, desires and dreams.

Dozens of children from different cities of Ukraine, such as Kiev, Kharkiv, Sumy, Irpin, Zaporizhzhia, participated in the workshops, developing their imagination, working on understanding and transmitting their own feelings and developing their psychological stability and emotional intelligence skills. These workshops helped reduce stress and anxiety, release destructive emotions, and achieve psychological balance among children and minors. Besides, an increased interest of the youth in art was observed.

The "Animation as a method of art therapy" initiative was implemented with the methodological and financial support of the national coordinator of the Ukrainian network of ICC cities, Dr. Kseniya Rubicondo, and the Intercultural City of Stavanger, Norway, respectively.

• Find out more about the results in the video here

In these difficult times for Ukraine, the ICC Lutsk continues to work on developing art therapy initiatives for internally displaced persons and city residents, including representatives of national minorities (e.g. Roma, Polish and Czech communities) of different age groups and on carring out art therapy activities in open spaces of the city. There are also prospects for continuing these practices in the post-war rehabilitation period.