We spent last week (June 7-12) in Barcelona at the annual Open Society Foundations Community for All Partnership seminar. We are looking forward to this event every year, because we know that we will have the opportunity to summarize the past year and meet our colleagues, but also to learn a lot of new and useful things from great lecturers Ami Vitale and Liz Banse. Our colleagues from the Association for Self Advocacy, representatives of the Hand In Hand organization in Georgia, psychiatrist Giorgi Geleishvili and Ani Mgeladze from Georgia,  Cerasela Nicoleta Predescu from Pro ACT Support Association in Romania, representatives of the Ceva De Spus organization from Romania and representatives of the Open Society Foundations were among the participants.

What is interesting about this seminar is actually its relaxed atmosphere. Participants are introduced to new trends in visual communication and they also have a chance to summarize and present their work in the past year. We had the opportunity to see the new website and video materials of the Georgian organization Hand in Hand, materials from the last film ‘Hello and Goodbye’ by Tomislav Žaja, another film by a georgian director Levan Adam about the problems of persons with mental difficulties and the importance of community based support in the prevention of institutionalization and to learn useful strategies of visual storytelling that will undoubtedly help us in our future work.
We left Barcelona full of new ideas and enthusiasm for the upcoming projects.