Over the course of 2023, and in collaboration with our AWAKEN Community of Practice (CoP), we took one of the most powerful tools we experimented with, Mapping Belonging, out into the wider community.

Mapping Belonging is a social cartography exercise that consists of identifying the different emotions that we associate with the different places where our lives (and the lives of other members of our society) take place. It encourages us to explore, from a place of curiosity, our conceptions of identity, belonging, difference and otherness, and gain deeper insights about our individual and collective lived experiences. 

It is a tool that serves as a participatory and experimental research method, while also creating a positive impact on the participants in the process of being implemented: it increases our ability to understand social diversity and empathize with other perspectives and values. 

Collective emotional mapping takes us out of the bubble of our individual worldview and shows us that we are part of a larger system where many different people find many different sources of meaning. A higher sense of self-awareness and social awareness are both key ingredients to the process of strengthening community bonds from a place of compassion and resilience, and they establish the grounds for positive interpersonal interaction and transformative change. Over the past year, we have been working with our AWAKEN Community of Practice to further refine and test out this tool, and facilitate it across diverse communities in Kuwait, collecting valuable data and promoting self-reflection and connection.

We have now created a publicly accessible facilitation manual and toolkit so that anyone interested in facilitating these kinds of explorations in their communities can now do so. If you are planning to use this tool, please feel free to reach out to us at giuliana@envearth.com with any questions and / or feedback. We'd love to hear from you!