Preparatory Meeting for Marriage and Conflict Mediation - Telling Stories to Improve Gender Equality and Peace.

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Description

Intro

The Preparatory Meeting for Marriage Life is a religious activity that consists of a day of activities with couples who wish to get married in the Catholic Church. To strengthen the good relationship of the couple we have added in our project basic knowledge of Conflict Mediation and Nonviolent Communication besides the exchange of stories with more experienced couples.

Objective of the practice

The goal of the practice is to provide young couples with basic knowledge in relationship management and to provide them a solid group support with couples with many years of marriage so that they can search when they are experiencing relationship difficulties. One of the greatest challenges of the project is to keep in touch with the couples after their participation in the meeting, so that we can continue life in the community and so that they can offer their experience to the other couples, thus maintaining a constructive cycle of exchange of information and good practices of family relationships.

Partners

The beneficiaries are couples who wish to get married in the Catholic Church and other couples or people who wish to support the project by working for it. The partners are the Catholic Church and Parish of Nossa Sra. Da Gloria in Laranjeiras - Largo do Machado.

Implementation of the Project/Activity

The project is the continuity of practice consolidated in the Catholic Church and which for two years was reorganized to include elements of conflict mediation and a differentiated format with a community project and support group for young couples. It consists of 4 annual meetings for young couples and monthly activities for couples who have already participated the meeting and who wish to contribute to the project. As a method of evaluating the meetings with the bride and groom, we worked with a round where we asked what the expectations of the bride and groom and at the end a round asking if the expectations were met and what they liked the most at the meeting.

Results/Outputs/Impacts

Since the beginning of the project in 2017, 7 meetings (3 in 2017 and 4 in 2018) have been held with 81 couples, 161 of whom wish to form families or to improve their relationship with and among the Catholic community.
As expressive results we have the construction of a supporting group to help the couples who participate the project when they go through difficulties. Most couples love the stories of the most experienced couples, they said that those stories make their marriage more solid.

Enabling factors and constraints

The history built by the Catholic Church and the methodology with bases designed by the family pastoral movement, coupled with the freedom given by the parish authorities, brought favorable conditions for the development of the activity. As a challenge to be overcome we had to adapt to do a job that required few people to work, since the meetings depend on volunteers.

Sustainability and replicability

The project is highly sustainable and easily replicable, since the couples participating in the Meeting fully fund the activity that is carried out with a fixed team of 4 people to take care of all the logistics and with groups of invited speakers, all work is voluntary.

Conclusions

The Marriage Preparatory Meeting teaches us that we only need goodwill and love to improve our society and make families stronger. The power of story-telling is transformative, as witnessed by one of the participants. "I liked the love and the commitment of the team. People always just talk about the wedding party. She was very happy to meet people she doesâ€™t know very well praying and wishing to everything in theirr wedding life goes well. It was a opportunity to learn by the example of the most experienced couples. Iâ€™m living the meeting transformed. "

SDGS & Targets

Goal 5

Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Goal 16

Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels