Common Cause: Creating Fashion for Healthy and Sober Lifestyle
Workshop
There isn’t a single organ, tissue, or element in the entire human body that wouldn’t feel the harmful effect of the alcohol.
Vvedenskii
In February 2009, ORT, Channel One of the Russian television under the initiative of the rector of Sretenskiy Monastery in Moscow, Archimandrite Tikhon, and the head of the Fight for Nation’s Sobriety Union Vladimir G. Zhdanov organized the Common Cause project and created documentaries and social advertisements that tell the truth about alcohol. Some of these videos were broadcasted on television, along with four talk shows on the topic. Four months of the project’s television activity showed stunning results: during the spring holidays of 2009, the number of alcohol consumption in the country decreased by an average of 20%!
The project collected a huge number of positive reviews, but soon it was shut down without any explanation. After that, a group of volunteers across the country began to spread the project materials and make educational presentations for various audiences at their own initiative.
The Moscow region also has a group of project activists that put all their efforts to this noble cause. In 2011, the group was granted a formal legal status of a public organization.
Moscow Regional Public Organization Common Cause was founded in early 2011. Our main area of activity is educational work in diverse social environments, especially in the youth communities. The purpose of the organization is to inspire young people to a healthy lifestyle through abstinence from alcohol, smoking and drugs. The essence of our work is to conduct free programs and workshops in different educational, public and governmental institutions, at which we provide accurate information about what alcohol and cigarettes really are and to what terrible consequences their consumption can lead each individual as well as the entire Russian nation. At these programs, we show video documentaries and social advertisements on the topic. At the end of each program, we offer DVD’s with the same materials as gifts to all attendees. DVD’s are produced on the money donated to us by patrons (sponsors) that we find ourselves. Our organization does not receive any public funding. All staff members (volunteers) of our organization strictly adhere to a healthy lifestyle, completely avoiding the use of alcohol, smoking and taking any other drugs. This gives us the moral right to talk to large audiences about the rejection of all of these substances, and allows us to inspire people to a healthy lifestyle by our own example, clearly demonstrating that complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is a norm, which allows for a life filled with healthy harmonious relationships, professional success and creativity, life full of real joy and love. All activists of our group are socially accomplished people; the majority of them have higher educational degrees. Being active in our professional surroundings and constantly involved in all modern social trends allows us to talk in modern, clear-cut and interesting language, demonstrating that alcohol and smoking only prevent people from success and true happiness.
Since 2011, activists of our organization conducted over three hundred educational programs at various educational institutions, defense and law enforcement agencies and distributed tens of thousands of DVD’s with the Common Cause informational materials. Thanks to our sponsors, our organization placed over forty social advertisement boards (3x6 meters) on the roadsides of Moscow suburbs.
With the support of our sponsors, Common Cause also opened a Russian martial arts studio in one of the suburban schools for children with speech impairments. A completely destroyed building was reconstructed in three months. The building underwent quality renovation; the organization helped purchase the appliances, equipment and gear for the studio. We also hired a coach to conduct martial art classes for the orphans.
In early 2012, with the support of our sponsors, our organization held a children's ice hockey tournament "The Defender of the Fatherland Cup", the motto of which was "Sport against Alcohol." The tournament was held among the students of the local Sports School who were born in 2004.
I would like to especially emphasize the need for education programs in various defense and law enforcement agencies: the military units of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Interior, the FPS and Ministry for Civil Defense. Our experience shows that this is a very important target audience, the work with which gives a significant positive result. If a person from a defense or law enforcement agency takes on the anti-alcohol ideology, he or she naturally involves all of the administrative resources available to him or her in the fight for sobriety, which significantly increases the effectiveness of the program advocacy in the Russian society as a whole. Our organization had developed a mechanism of interaction with such agencies, which resulted in approximately one hundred educational programs for staff and students of these agencies, during which we covered an audience of over ten thousand people. That includes two divisions stationed in the Moscow region, several police departments of Moscow suburbs and district police departments of Moscow, several units of Ministry for Civil Defense in Moscow and three general correctional facilities in the Moscow region.
Two years (the educational programs had started before the official registration of the organization) of our active involvement in the Moscow region and surrounding areas yielded interesting and extensive experience of working with a variety of audiences and social groups. We developed a number of effective methods of the representation of educational materials; we also worked out the skills of building efficient psychological and emotional contact with the audience that allows us to keep people's attention throughout the program and leave a bright emotional impression on the attendees after the presentation. Such strong emotional impact evokes people’s attention to the information that we provide, activates their interest to the DVD that they get as a gift after the program and encourages them to get back to what they saw and heard again and again, which, in the majority of cases, leads to the right decision – to completely give up drinking and smoking.
Man, who stopped drinking and smoking, acquires the mental clarity and calmness which lights up all of the life phenomena for him from a new perspective.
Leo Tolstoy
Kindest regards,
Director, MOOO Common Cause
Yaroslav V. Kovalevsky
http://проектобщеедело.рф
Насыров А.Н., профессор (Новосибирск)
Неужто те, кто ухищряется во зле,