Category: collective healing

UNESCO, through its Routes of Enslaved Peoples programme, has been working with the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace since 2018 to develop a methodology for facilitating collective healing. Based on a desk review mapping impactful practices in the field, intergenerational dialogue workshops were co-created and led by impacted communities across four continents (Africa, Europe,
North America and South America) in 2023-24. These sessions proved to be deeply transformative, uplifting impacted communities in recovering historic resources and wisdom that have sustained them throughout hardship, and enabling them to reflect on possible solutions towards systemic change.

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Research Spotlight: New Perspectives on Healing Collective Trauma

How do we heal history’s deepest wounds? In her new Open Access book, “New Perspectives on Healing Collective Trauma,” Prof. Scherto Gill brings together global voices to explore the intersection of structural justice, intergenerational dialogue, and collective healing. Featuring insights from Professors Myriam Cottias, Ana Lucia Araujo, and Lord Alderdice, Drs Joy DeGruy, Ali Moussa Iye, Esther Armah, Gail Christopher, Thomas Hübl, Indigenous leader, Lewis Cardinal, and more.

📖 Read it for free by clicking on this open access book link: New Perspectives on Healing Collective Trauma: Towards Social Justice and Communal Well-Being

In an era marked by deep global divisions, how do societies move beyond the paralysis of historical wounds? This groundbreaking new volume, “New Perspectives on Healing Collective Trauma,” edited by Prof. Scherto Gill, offers a transformative roadmap. Moving the conversation beyond individual psychology, this book establishes collective healing as a systemic, structural, and intergenerational imperative necessary for achieving genuine social justice.

Why This Research Matters Now

Historical injustices—enslavement, colonialism, and systemic racism—are not just events of the past; they are lived realities that continue to shape economic disparities, political polarization, and cultural fragmentation. This book argues that traditional approaches to peacebuilding often fail because they neglect the deep spiritual and psychosocial wounds that communities carry across generations.

This research highlights that healing is political. It connects the inner work of trauma integration with the outer work of structural change, proposing that we cannot have one without the other.

Key Innovations & Frameworks

The book introduces and expands upon several cutting-edge concepts that redefine the field of trauma studies and peacebuilding:

  • Intergenerational Dialogue and Inquiry (IDI): A flagship methodology featured in the book (and piloted by the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative), IDI creates safe spaces for youth and elders to break the silence on past atrocities, facilitating a transfer of wisdom and resilience rather than just trauma.
  • The Politics of Dignity: Prof. Gill challenges current governance models, proposing a “politics of dignity” where institutions are intentionally designed to affirm the intrinsic value of every person, actively dismantling the structures of dehumanization.
  • Emotional Justice: Contributor Esther A. Armah introduces a language to navigate the unspoken emotional economies of racism, arguing that policy changes are insufficient without addressing the “emotional currency” of oppression.
  • Healing Architecture: The volume explores how our physical environments and public spaces can be designed to foster relational health and communal repair, rather than enforcing separation.

Global Case Studies

The research is grounded in diverse, real-world applications, offering a truly global perspective:

  • The Americas: Examining the enduring legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the demand for reparations (featuring contributions from Joy DeGruy and Ana Lucia Araujo).
  • Canada: Centering Indigenous voices in the processes of Truth and Reconciliation (Lewis Cardinal).
  • Global South & Beyond: Insights from community-led healing circles in Africa and racial healing initiatives in the US (Gail C. Christopher).

Who Should Read This?

This volume is an essential resource for researchers, policymakers, community organizers, and peace practitioners. It bridges the gap between academic theory and grassroots practice, offering tools for those working in:

  • Conflict Transformation & Peacebuilding
  • Public Health & Trauma Studies
  • Social Policy & Governance
  • Indigenous Studies & Decolonial Practice

Read the Full Research

As a commitment to global knowledge equity, this title is available as an Open Access publication. Read the book for free here

#CollectiveHealing #SocialJustice #TraumaResearch #OpenAccess

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Simone Weil on love, justice and collective healing.

New Peer-Reviewed Open-Access Article.

Read the full paper here:

Dehumanisation as spiritual harm: Simone Weil on love justice and collective healing

This paper examines the spiritual dimension of dehumanisation and argues that confronting this neglected aspect is essential to healing historical and structural harms. Drawing on the philosophical and theological writings of Simone Weil, it offers a relational interpretation of her insights into the sacred roots of human dignity, the soul-wounding effects of dehumanisation, and love as an antidote to brutality. Through Weil’s concepts of affliction, social degradation and structural injustice, the paper demonstrates that dehumanisation operates not only through material and psychological violence but also through spiritual violation that severs persons and communities from the good.

Building on Weil’s ethical vision, the paper advances a four-fold intergenerational approach to addressing spiritual harm: (1) acknowledging dehumanisation and the reality of affliction; (2) reclaiming human dignity rooted in the sacred; (3) strengthening spiritual belonging through community and intergenerational continuity; and (4) imagining a culture of love oriented to justice and co-flourishing.

Illustrated through contemporary examples, including UNESCO’s Collective Healing Initiative, the paper argues that Weil’s wisdom contributes both philosophically and practically to collective healing, social justice and the regeneration of communities impacted by slavery, colonialism and other enduring forms of inhumanity.

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Prof Scherto Gill presenting Collective Healing Initiative at 2025 Inner Development Goals Summit

In this video, Prof Scherto Gill offers an outline of her presentation at 2025 Inner Development Goals Summit, focusing on exploring the four processes of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, including an intergenerational approach to leadership as healership.

On October 16th, at the IDG Summit, Track 6 – Healing the Roots of What Drives Us Apart, will explore how trauma-informed leadership can open pathways for systemic healing, peacebuilding, and societal defragmentation. This digital track is an immersive journey into the root causes of polarisation and healing collective trauma, blending trauma science, conflict transformation, and embodied leadership.

Through live group process, reflective practice, artistic embodiment, and narrative tracking, participants will witness how inner development practices can transform fragmentation into collective insight and how to embed this wisdom in leadership, organisations, and society.

Prof Scherto Gill reflected on the question “What does it take to heal the deep divisions of our world today?” By tracing the development and processes of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, the presentation brings forward communities across four continents experiences engaging in an intergenerational approach to shifting from trauma towards flourishing. This involves facing the wounds of injustice with courage, rediscovering ancestral wisdom with curiosity, nurturing new ways of belonging with compassion, and envisioning well-being futures with care.

This makes the case for why the intergenerational processes of collective healing are not abstract, but involve essential inner capacities of transforming leadership as healer-ship.

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Workshop participants of Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures, Mansfield College, Oxford.

Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures: Reflections from Workshop

On 19th September, scholars, researchers and practitioners gathered in Mansfield College, Oxford, for a workshop on Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures. This event was co-convened in partnership with the Journal of Dialogue Studies, which will publish a special issue (Vol. 14, 2025) on the same theme.

My motivation for guest-editing this issue arises from five years of work with the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative. At the heart of Initiative are the Collective Healing Circles (CHCs), intergenerational spaces created in communities across Africa, the Americas, and Europe. In these circles, people of all ages come together to acknowledge historical mass atrocities, recognise continued wounds, reclaim ancestral wisdom and human dignity, transcend divisions, and co-imagine shared flourishing. They have shown me both the transformative potential and the challenges of intergenerational dialogue and inspired me to bring these questions into wider academic and policy exploration.

A workshop structured as a journey

Following an inspiring keynote from Youssef Mahmoud, former UN Under-Secretary-General, the academic workshop’s programme followed a deliberate arc:

  • Contexts – situating dialogue in linguistic, historical, ethical, grassroots, digital, and spiritual arenas.
  • Conceptualisations – examining how intergenerational dialogue is conceived epistemologically, ethically, and culturally, and how it can serve healing, and transformation.
  • Practices – exploring how dialogue is enacted and transmitted through arts, memory, and creative media.
  • Futures – considering how intergenerational dialogue might serve as a foundation for justice, solidarity, and flourishing societies.

This progression created space not only for rich scholarly exchange, but also for deep reflection on the ethical, methodological, and political dimensions of dialogue across generations.

Insights across the sessions

Several themes resonated across the day:

  • Transmission and transformation: Dialogue mediates the tension between preserving ancestral wisdom and inherited knowledge and transforming it for the future.
  • Agency and co-authorship: Who has the authority to decide what is remembered, transmitted, or reinterpreted? Intergenerational dialogue demands genuine co-authorship.
  • Dialogue as ethical practice: Listening, translation, ritual, and creativity are not just methods, but ethical commitments.
  • Challenges of reconciliation: Dialogues are often uncomfortable — grappling with guilt, silence, or denial — yet necessary for relational repair.
  • Futures through justice: Dialogue is not only about the past; it is a path to recognition, resilience, and flourishing futures.

One aspect that remains insufficiently addressed is the overwhelming domination of structural injustice, which continues to define the lived experience of the global majority. While academic research offers decolonial critique and systemic analysis, the challenge ahead lies in reimagining global governance that can respond to these realities.

Looking ahead

For me, one of the most moving aspects of the workshop was how much it echoed the spirit of the UNESCO Collective Healing Circles. We saw how dialogue is never neutral: it carries risks of stereotyping or tokenising, but also profound possibilities for recognition, resilience, and transformation. We saw how young people are not simply listeners or translators, but co-creators of meaning and futures. And we saw how elders are not only custodians of memory, but partners in reshaping change.

As we move forward, the next step is to revise and deepen the papers in light of the workshop conversations. Guided by the Journal of Dialogue Studies framework, the special issue will ensure that contributions are theoretically rich, methodologically and ethically strong, and — most importantly — relevant to the question at the heart of our gathering: how intergenerational dialogue can nurture well-being futures in contexts marked by structural injustice.

I am grateful to all who joined us in Oxford, for your generosity, insights, and presence. This is not the end, but part of a continuing journey to explore and enact intergenerational dialogue as a vital resource for our shared futures.

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workshop in mansfield college oxford

Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures: Theories, Practices and Policy Pathways.

An Academic Workshop

19th September 2025, Mansfield College, Oxford

The Journal of Dialogue Studies, in partnership with the GHfP Institute, the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace, UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, invited contributions for a special issue exploring the role of intergenerational dialogue in shaping collective well-being futures.

In recognising that despite global commitments to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), progress remains impeded by persistent barriers, including transgenerational trauma, structural injustice, gender inequality, limited youth engagement, and fragmented political responses. In the face of these obstacles, intergenerational dialogue is increasingly important as it creates facilitated spaces for younger and older people to encounter and learn from each other. Such dialogue allows the community to draw insights from multiple generations, diverse cultural traditions, and rich cosmological worldviews towards building better futures. 

This special issue is inspired by the power and potential of intergenerational dialogue. It is a response to the call of the United Nations Pact for the Future, which underscores the necessity of equitable intergenerational processes and collaborative approaches to multilateral governance to ensure sustainable peace, structural justice, and inclusive well-being. 

International Academic Workshop Programme – Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures Theories, Practices, and Policy Pathways – University of Oxford – 19 September 2025 (2)
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chc facilitators learning event 2025

Collective Healing Initiative. Facilitators Learning Circle, September 2025

By Scherto R. Gill, Director, Global Humanity for Peace Institute

Every other month, on the second Tuesday, a constellation of facilitators gathers online — a learning circle stretching across 16 countries, 4 continents, and 4 languages: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. With the gentle help of AI translation, each voice is received in our own tongue, weaving a luminous tapestry of shared understanding.

On 16th September, 25 facilitators formed our circle. We came together to explore how the Collective Healing Circle (CHC) programme can be tailored to the diverse lived realities of our communities.

The gathering opened with drums from Richmond, Virginia, followed by a short poem carrying the breath from the Amazon — grounding us in rhythm, verses and spirit.

I offered the three inquiries that guide tailoring — investigative, appreciative, and evaluative. These aren’t academic theories. They’re invitations to listen into context before inviting people into the circle — to understand the particular music of each community before attempting to add harmony. Collective Healing practices can’t be copy-and-pasted. They must grow from the soil where they’re planted, shaped by the stories and metaphors already living in that place, responsive to the specific ways that community holds both pain and possibility.

To illustrate how these inquiries unfold in practice, our colleagues from Mexico shared how they wove Indigenous prophecies and ancestral wisdom into the CHC framework. Their presentation was colourful and inviting — words dancing with images, feelings moving through liminal spaces. Not as decoration, but as foundation. Not as addition, but as recognition of what was already there, waiting to be honored. Their approach was as much art as methodology: honouring both the common CHC framework and the particular practice of their land, letting each inform the other until something new is born and emerged.

From there, we dissolved into six small breakout rooms — in four different languages — where 2-4 facilitators gathered in intimate dialogue. These conversations deepened our reflections: What resonated? What requires more care? How might we all be co-creators of the circle? For thirty minutes, these questions evoked and breathed in eight different conversations. Connections spark across impossible distances. Challenges find company. Dormant ideas are awaken through the alchemy of shared reflection.

When the learning circle reforms, something has shifted. Insights pour back into the shared space—through voices and images, stories and the vibrant river of the chat feed. Each offering another thread in the tapestry they’re weaving together.

We closed with an ancestral African chant, together across the screen, a reminder of the deep wisdom carried through song requiring no translation.

The circle completes itself not by ending, but by beginning again. Each facilitator carries seeds of inspiration back to their local communities, back to the particular soil where the healing work takes root.

chc facilitator art
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golden patches, embracing Intergenerational wisdom

The Golden Patches: Embracing Intergenerational Wisdom

In Colombia, Cauca, south of Popayán, at the Estrella Roja Humanitarian Camp, established during the 2021 Social Outbreak, has emerged as an organizational experience sustained by community self-management and the leadership of women, youth, and diverse families who defend life, territory, and dignity.

As part of the implementation of the Collective Healing Circles Program, an artistic project called “Golden Patches” has been developed, which constitutes a strategy of memory, expression, and collective care.

The activity brings together adult and older women, along with young women and girls, who, gathered in simple community spaces, work with needles, fabrics, and golden threads. Each participant uses a scrap of fabric from personal items that have accompanied their lives, on which they embroider simple and deeply meaningful symbols.  These embroideries express their resistance to displacement, gender violence, social exclusion, and urban precariousness, as well as the inner treasures cultivated amidst these experiences.

The images that result from this exercise—trees, roots, flowers, and hearts—reflect the community’s resilience and spiritual strength. Each golden stitch becomes an act of healing and a recognition of the inner strength that has allowed them to resist and transform pain.

The embroidered fragments will be compiled in a collective golden book, presented on community altars as a tribute to shared struggles, living memories, and the hope built collectively.

The Mendiendos Dorados process is more than a craft practice: it constitutes a living heritage, a way of narrating memory and affirming dignity through symbolic and spiritual languages that strengthen community bonds.

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de gruyter publication, beyond humanity, edited by Scherto

Beyond Inhumanity – Open-Access book published by DeGruyter

Edited by Prof Scherto Gill, Beyond Inhumanity is a book that emerges from the ongoing intellectual dialogue as part of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative. The Initiative focuses on healing the wounds of inhumanity, co-creating just societies and enhancing the flourishing of current and future generations.

About this book

Collective efforts to address the legacies of slavery and colonialism tend to orient solely towards dealing with material compensation, such as reducing economic disparity, and levelling access to public services. However, communities directly impacted by the dehumanizing legacies have insisted on a broader reckoning—one that recognizes all dimensions of the harms, including the spiritual injury and the relevant psychosocial trauma inflicted across the generations. They remind us that harms of structural injustice extend beyond the material, the physical and the psychological, also entangling the moral, relational, and spiritual fabric of human life. Understanding harms of inhumanity brings to light the layers of damage and is key to identifying interdisciplinary approaches to collective healing, social transformation and the well-being of all.

This book emerges from the ongoing intellectual dialogue as part of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative. The Initiative focuses on healing the wounds of inhumanity, co-creating just societies and enhancing the flourishing of current and future generations.

Beyond Inhumanity published by DeGruyter —>

  • Brings together under-explored questions and provides succinct answers to them in one volume.
  • Includes multi-disciplinary perspectives.
  • Connected to a UNESCO global initiative.

Author / Editor information

Scherto Gill, University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter, UK.

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