Training Ugandans in Trauma Informed Care

One of the foundational beliefs of our work is that healing is a practice that brings about a ripple effect - from the individual, to the interpersonal, to the collective, to the systemic, to the world. While we understand that this isn’t a process that happens in a linear way, and that healing alone won’t bring about systemic change, we get to see in our work every day the ways this ripple moves through the communities we work with and are a part of. When we heal ourselves, we heal each other. We use the salves that have tended to our wounds to tend to the wounds of others.

The value of this work is felt by communities, such as the Karo community that asked our team to return to provide Healing advocacy and peer support training to parents and care givers after a 4-day training that was offered to youth in this community last year. Parents were eager to talk about the positive impact that last year’s training had on their children and their excitement to participate in this work for themselves.

The wisdom of understanding trauma and its impact enables parents and adults that work with and support youth to move away from harmful dynamics, such as corporal punishment towards relationships to youth and children that are generative where those young people can then become cycle breakers in their family lineages.

The folks impacted by our work in Uganda share in our belief in the ripple effect of healing. In post-workshop surveys, 90% of participants say that if everyone in the world had access to this training, there would be peace and harmony in the world; a world free from violence and harm.