Our Purpose

  • Communities affected by systemic harm in the form of persistent poverty, widespread violence and sustained marginalization often live with the long-term impacts of collective trauma. If left unaddressed, this can affect individual and collective wellbeing as well as the efficacy of community efforts to achieve peace, justice and socioeconomic equity. Meanwhile, standalone psychosocial wellbeing programs that address socioemotional suffering without addressing the political, social, contextual and historical causes of ongoing harm may miss opportunities to partner with communities that seek to challenge this oppression and prevent future harm.

  • Through collaborative partnerships and research, we seek to better understand how culturally and contextually rooted psychosocial wellbeing programs can help promote individual and collective resilience and strengthen community capacity to address the injustices they face. With this knowledge, we seek to expand the field’s collective understanding and commitment to the role of psychosocial wellbeing as integral, and not supplemental, to achieving peace, justice and socioeconomic equity.

Our Programs

  • The Arivana Project supports the development of trauma-informed, culturally responsive psychosocial wellbeing approaches in communities affected by systemic harm internationally. By coordinating and convening experienced international and local partners, we facilitate contextual learning to understand the cultural and community factors associated with wellbeing. Grounded in this learning, we collaborate with partners to design psychosocial wellbeing approaches that are rooted in local knowledge and community-led practices. Our initial pilot will be in the Karamoja region of Uganda, and future collaborations may take place in additional countries to support learning across diverse contexts.

  • Through documentation and dissemination, we will support nonprofits, practitioners, and funders seeking to integrate psychosocial wellbeing into community programs that address system harm, internationally. The project will share resources for both embedding collective healing programs within community contexts, as well as learning, opportunities and outcomes from pilot programs.

  • Drawing on learning from both our pilot projects as well as collaborative research on other promising models, we will design and deliver training programs that build the capacity of practitioners to integrate trauma-informed psychosocial healing approaches into international community led programs. Activities may include workshops and training sessions for nonprofit organizations, a fellowship program for practitioners in the transnational community development and psychosocial fields, and mentorship and learning exchanges that support implementation.

Partnership Values

  • We commit to listening, learning and acting with humility.

    We believe that knowledge and expertise are gained in many ways including through lived experience as survivors, family relations and community members, as well as through field experience as frontline advocates and healers.    

  • We acknowledge the power dynamics that exist in transnational partnerships.

    We will seek to advocate for, and support, community led initiaves following the mantra “nothing about us, without us.”

  • We prioritize partner wellbeing.

    We will aim to limit unnecessary administrative and reporting burden on movement partners, and will do our own work to gather available information through existing research, intermediaries and funder partners.  We will also attend to the sustainability of partner work by supporting the wellbeing of frontline staff.

  • We recognize that healing and wellbeing are rooted in culture and context.

    We will encourage openness and inclusivity to the myriad of human experiences, emotions, cultures and approaches that center community strengths while fostering healing and collective power.