Beyond Borders: Linking Our Stories  was founded in 2012 when the lack of women-led peace initiatives was contributing to lack of women’s voices and perspectives on conflict transformation in the Turkish-Armenian normalization process. The vision of the group is to contribute to building trust and solidarity among women’s groups, including cis and trans women regardless of conflict borders. Since 2012, the group has grown and developed methods to contribute to the building of trust and solidarity among women both within the group and with groups from women’s movements from various contexts. We do this by providing workshops on non-verbal communication and body movement techniques incorporating storytelling and performance as methods of trust and solidarity building.

The group’s biggest achievement has been the continuity and establishment of a group who is always ready to work together and meet to build on our methods among ourselves and with other groups. From this the idea has grown to build a healing group by developing the skills and knowledge of different group members in various non-verbal, body-movement, integrated security, performance and any other healing methods, which can later be useful when working with women’s groups in different contexts in need of support to build trust and solidarity among each other.