Two child and community psychologists living in Norway (May Lene Karlsen) and the UK (Gail Sinitsky), launched a report in collaboration with the Open University about children’s experiences of the pandemic. This project “has offered children the opportunity to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences of the pandemic via an online survey, in either written or art form.” Read more about this project here.
Coronavirus
EFPA released a Coronavirus position statement by ECPA and the EFPA-SC-Community Psychology
EFPA EMC 18/2020: How to strengthen communities in times of crisis
EFPA has released some basic recommendations on the social effects on communities in relation to the Coronavirus spread based on a community psychology perspective. The document remarks that Community Psychology can offer specialist competencies and tools that are useful for real problems both locally and on a global scale.
The SC Community Psychology has together with our Associate member the European Community Psychology Association ECPA prepared this information and converted into an EFPA position statement. The document is available here and on the EFPA Hub about the COVID-Crisis.
Videorecording of EFPA webinars available on EFPA Psychologists Support Hub
At EFPA’s Psychologists Support Hub are available the video recording and PowerPoint presentations of following three EFPA webinars offered at the end of April 2020.
- How to set-up a Psychological counseling helpline in the COVID-19 context?
- Online consultations, what to know and where to start?
- COVID-19 and implications for mental health
The hub can be reached via the following links: http://psychologists-support-hub.eu or http://covid19forpsychologists.eu
The New Bank for Community Ideas and Solutions
During the Covid-19 crisis, many individuals and communities have been resonating about new forms of sense of community, mutual support and neighbourhood, and also acting in a surprisingly creative manner, collaborating and re-inventing community life.
We would like to know what is going on and we want to capture community lessons for our society from these experiences.
Perhaps your own community has experienced a surprising situation or developed a distinctive response to the coronavirus outbreak. We encourage you to share your experience by answering our survey, accessible via the button below.
We aim to post these experiences in multiple sites (e.g., ECPA, SCRA, CTB, etc). We will also share the stories in a Facebook Group and later at the new webportal of the New Bank of Community Ideas and Solutions.
We hope this site may help to demonstrate the importance of community building in a time of crisis, and illustrate the many ways that community psychology and community action can make a contribution.
Remembering our shared moments and experiences will help to create a better world!
Wolfgang Stark (Germany); Bill Berkowitz, Tom Wolff and Bradley Olson (USA); Cinzia Albanesi and Caterina Arcidiacono (Italy); Maria Fernandes-Jesus and Maria Vargas-Moniz (Portugal).
Coronavirus pandemic: the role of Community Psychologists in Europe
ECPA CALL TO ACTION #5 Join the CPs “Fridays for coping with the Coronavirus pandemic”
We invite you to join our weekly CPs meetings. 31 participants across the world joined the conference call launched by Wolfgang Stark. See a short summary here. So it was decided that this could become a regular date for CPs. Each Fridays at 5pm (CET) Wolfgang Stark will host the meeting, regularly updates of the meeting will be published here, community psychologists across Europe and the rest of the world are invited to join.
Zoom-meeting will take place regularly on Friday at 5 pm CET. To attend please click here.
ECPA CALL TO ACTION #4 Create a useful resource platform here
We invite you to share tools, materials, and articles to create a resource platform for important tools to cope with the crisis on the psychosocial ground. We will collect them on our ECPA website. Send them by email to cinzia.albanesi@unibo.it or ecpa.psychassociation@gmail.com
ECPA CALL TO ACTION #3 Share your stories of fear and hope on the ECPA Facebook page
We also invite you to share your stories of fears and hopes we are experiencing in our countries at ECPA’s Facebook page.
ECPA CALL TO ACTION #2 Join the conference call launched by Wolfgang Stark ECPA-EFPA liaison member
Dear community psychology colleagues and friends,
In one of the most disruptive times of our lifetime and in our societies there is no doubt that our ‘sense of community‘ and our ability for mutual support may become a crucial factor how we will cope with a situation we never experienced before. This will be especially true for the weakest groups in our societies (see “Combating a Mental Health Pandemic“ and attachments).
This may be the time when community psychology will be able to prove if our competencies and tools will be useful for real problems both locally and in a global scale. At the same time we are called for creative and immediate action to strengthen our communities towards a challenge we never experienced before. I wonder if you have similar thoughts and ideas.
If so, I would like to invite you to share your ideas, concerns, action, and experiences on what community psychology and community psychologists could contribute to strengthen the ‘sense of community’ facing isolation and social distance as a consequence of the corona pandemic.
If this makes sense to you, please join me for a community psychology Zoom call on Friday, March 20, 5 pm (CET). let us share ideas on how we can be supportive as community psychologists both on a local and global level. If you want to participate, please use the following link.
ECPA CALL TO ACTION #1
We invite Community Psychologists to use their professional networks and competencies to support communities’ adoption of safety behaviours, to share useful (verified) information, and to help people, in particular those who are more fragile (i.e. homeless people, digital immigrants), to cope with the quarantine related measures and the psychological impact of the emergency. If you have materials, documents that you think may be useful to be shared please send them to ecpa.psychassociation@gmail.com we will be happy to publish them on our website.
EFPA INITIATIVES
EFPA has shared some guidelines and possible actions for psychologists to deal with the COVID-19 emergency in its member associations in its homepage.
ECPA as an associate partner of EFPA recommends Community Psychologists in Europe to follow the guidelines on personal protection, environmental countermeasures, social distancing countermeasures and travel-related countermeasures provided by ECDC. The website provides daily updates on the situation.
On EFPA page there are also links to other useful resources related to the following topics:
- Provision of first-line psychological support
- Provision of online consultation
- The psychological impact of quarantine – How to cope with quarantine/isolation
- How do our member associations deal with the crisis?
#besafe #beresponsible #stopcoronavirus