This project is fund by the Global Fund for Women (GFW) and will be conducted from March 2008 to March 2010. It is based on another project fund by GFW implemented in 2004/ 2005.

This former project supported survivors of gender-based violence in the Cau Giay District of Hanoi through communication of prevention methods in the community and to the survivors. Furthermore it supplied the survivors with counseling and mental help on the phone and face-to-face and established clubs for the survivors to share their feelings and help each other.
The support and these clubs obviously helped the survivors to become more self-confident, raise their voice and just find new happiness in life as Ms. Paola Canturo , a writer who works closely with GFW noticed after visiting such a club to show its efforts: “I can not imagine that they have just met each other for six months. I thought that they must have joined this club together for so long.” Among fellow sufferers there is just a bigger and deeper understanding and sympathy which leads to a good base to overcome violence situations and find possible solutions. In the end some survivors even functioned as advisors for other clubs for survivors of domestic violence.

The current project now supports a development which has partly been started before: the developing of former survivors to future social workers to support other survivors. Anyway the job of a social worker is rather challenging and requires some important skills. First you need to change your own thinking and see things from another perspective. Besides you need to have skills to lead such a club for the survivors. In this point it is necessary to know how to collect peers to your club, how to make it attractive for other people to join the club, how to motivate people to share their feelings and talk about their problems, how to interact with people in a positive way. Furthermore these social workers have to have knowledge about effective management and facilitating and last but not least they need to ensure the economic survival of the club maybe through a small fundraising business.

This project still includes professional counseling through a hotline which is naturally needed by the survivors to overcome their harmful past and present of suffering from gender-based violence and get connected to such a club, but above all the main objective is to build a self-help network for the survivors to support other survivors and build new clubs.
To reach this second objective, training workshops will be held in the current clubs to motivate people to participate in this project. Continuing with this group of participants several 4-day training workshops will be held about positive thinking, counseling skills, working with vulnerable people, moreover self-management and group facilitating. The difficulties and efforts of the new social workers will be shared three times a month to find solutions for up-coming problems and strengthen their skills.

Finally CSAGA hopes to build a strong network of former survivors of domestic violence or current survivors with more experience in club participating and sharing feelings to help new survivors fast and effectively and build more clubs which are able to run on their own.