Eva Michálková

18.04.2024

Our award-winning project received high-level European Commission visit

On 17 April we met with Ruth Paserman from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion and with Monika Ladmanová, Head of the European Commission's Representation in Prague. Meeting was realized during our mini-conference in connection with the social innovation project, for which we won the prestigious Regiostars Awards awarded to successful projects financed by the European Union.

Our project has won from among 51 projects in the category Social and Inlcusive Europe.

In the project, we focused on innovating our services for victims and survivors of sexual violence, and one of the outputs was preparatory materials for a unique comprehensive centre for victims of sexual violence in the Czech Republic. We successfully opened this centre, called PORT, in January 2024. The presentation of the project outputs was the subject of the mentioned mini-conference.

Monika Ladmanová, the Head of the European Commission’s Representation in the Czech Republic, said: “The REGIOSTARS Awards are yearly prizes for exceptional EU-funded projects. That is why I am very glad that one of the winners is the Czech organisation proFem. This shows that the European Union speaks and must extend help and assistance to the victims of domestic and sexual violence. We shall not and cannot tolerate such widespread phenomenon, still present in the society.”

"Thanks to this project, we laid foundations of PORT Centre” 

"Thanks to this EU-funded project, we were able to work intensively for two years on improving our ways how to support survivors of sexual violence through our services and how to make a positive change in their lives: for example, by reducing the negative impact of the trauma they have experienced or improving their mental health. Closely related to these innovations in our services is the creation of the first comprehensive centre for victims of sexual violence in the Czech Republic, the foundations of which we were able to lay thanks to the project. With the PORT Centre, we are responding to critical gaps in the system of assistance to victims and survivors of sexual violence and offering a range of services responding to the acute, as well as long-term needs of victims under one roof," says Jitka Poláková, directress of proFem.

Projective tool helps our clients during individual and group psychotherapy

During the project, the we also developed several other outputs and tools for direct work with victims and survivors, such as a tool for trauma psychotherapy. This is used by psychotherapists during individual and group work with victims. It helps clients to understand their own experience, facilitates communication about the topic and the naming of specific emotions, impacts and reactions to the traumatic event. "The tool has been very beneficial to our psychotherapeutic work with victims and survivors of sexual violence, helping clients understand complex mechanisms such as freezing, for example. Many of our clients have feelings of guilt and say to themselves that they should have defended themselves more, for example. Therefore, it is very important for us to support clients in realizing and experiencing that the body's defensive reactions are instinctive and no one chooses them consciously. And it is with the help of this visual aid that some topics are grasped more easily, more accessibly and more clearly on the level of experience," says Markéta Pekárková, head of psychotherapy services at proFem.

PORT capacity building supported by European Social Funds

The support of our organization from the ESF does not end with the social innovation project. Until 2025, we are implementing a project in which we focus on internal capacity of the comprehensive PORT center. We therefore focus on topics such as effective management and distribution of competences in the team, sustainable financing of the operation of the entire center as well as systematization of communication about our activities and services.

Watch the video summarizing the main information about the award-winning project and our services.