Trauma Resources International
A 501(c)(3)

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What are some of TRI’s programs and projects?

TRI has three primary areas of focus, or core competencies:

1. Community-based public/mental health programming
2. Creative Arts, Somatic (Mind-Body) and Cross-Cultural approaches and methods for Trauma and Resiliency Programs and Interventions
3. Tending the Helper’s Fire: Secondary Trauma Mitigation for individuals, groups, organizations and communities.

All of TRI’s programs and projects are tailored to suit the needs of individual programs, people and communities served. Our approach is a strength-based approach that respects, honors and builds on local resources, systems and traditions. Organizational objectives are:

1. Promote systems that restore resiliency and well-being in areas and individuals and communities affected by crisis, disaster, violence and traumatic events;
2. Reduce the whole (physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual) impact of working with trauma and work in dangerous, insecure situations on people, communities and organizations;
3. Building capacity for people, organizations and communities to implement effective, culturally congruent, innovative strategies, programs and systems to assist in the restorative process following traumatic experience.

 

Description of programs: Ke Ansam

Ke Ansam (“Hearts Together”): is TRI’s Emergency Response Program for Haiti. Set into motion on January 13, 2010, Ke Ansam supports these three longstanding, on-the-ground, local organizations in Haiti:

• IDEO (Institut de Development Personnel et Organisatinnel) is founded
 and directed by Port au Prince’ most respected and well-known psychologists, and has expertise in developing community-based mental health and psychosocial programming. In partnership with URAMEL (see below), and under the leadership of widely recognized Haitian trauma psychologist Dr. Roseline Benjamin, they have established Haiti’s first ever psycho trauma center (“Sant Siko Twauma”) to provide a full range of mental health services—from community based psych-social to professional clinical programs -- throughout Haiti.
• URAMEL is Haiti’s only local NGO to provide training to mental health, medical and health care professionals who treat Haiti’s many victims of disaster, violence and torture. Staff includes medical, forensic and social work professionals who assist, train and support clinics and hospitals all over Haiti. They work closely with Haiti’s finest medical school, and are partnering with IDEO to provide comprehensive health care and mental health services throughout Haiti.
• IDEO and URAMEL, jointly, have received seed funding to launch Haiti’s first comprehensive trauma response center. URAMEL will direct the medical program and Dr. Benjamin will direct the mental health component, called The Psycho Trauma Center. Additional funding is essential so that this program can develop a training component and set up community-based, satellite programs throughout Haiti. TRI is assisting in the development and delivery of clinical and training services as well as overall program design and development for the community-based mental health component.
• Athletique D’ Haiti, an after-school sports and tutoring program. This group works with youth from the Cité Soleil and Bel Air slums of Port-au-Prince, and was the only organization to operate effectively in Cite Soleil during the violent periods of 2004-8. ADH normally provides education, food, and after school activities to youth ages 6-18.
• ADH’s founder, Boby Duval, has operated many crisis and trauma response initiatives for Haiti’s youth in difficult times. His property is currently an Internally Displaced Persons (“IDP”) camp for over 5000 thousand families, and he is working 24-7 to provide food, medicine, hygiene, shelter, recreational and psycho-social programming—and to continue to care for the children who still attend his programs. One of the innovative projects TRI has supported ADH with is the purchase, preparation and distribution of truckloads of earthquake rubble to fill in a high density IDP area within the impoverished and violence- prone Cite Soleil slum. This area was flood-prone, and the new fill has eliminated flooding during the rainy season and allowed families to live in relative safety and comfort. Future plans include cleaning the dying river that runs through this area (work successfully begun), installing water systems, and providing homes made from converted supply containers to community members who will permanently settle here.

Click to view an update from Amber on the progress in Haiti.

 

Hands on Haiti

Hands on Haiti (“Mete Men pou Ayiti”): is a project of Ke Ansam, co-directed by Amber Gray and Karen Brown, LMHC/LMT. We have just returned from our “maiden voyage”; in one week our team of four CranioSacral Therapy (CST) practitioners provided between 300-400 sessions to the Haitian people at TRI’s partnership sites. Our hope was to aid in the relief of Post-Traumatic Stress symptoms and to help people reconnect to themselves in the wake of the unprecedented devastation caused by the January 12 earthquake. Because massage therapy and other bodywork modalities have been a very successful addition to disaster relief efforts, and based on the large number of somatic complaints reported to TRI’s director in counseling sessions, TRI is integrating this hands-on project to provide direct and immediate relief.

Many of those who received sessions report a lessening of pain, improved sleep, and a sense of having rested for the first time in three months.

We are in the process of developing the next phase of the Hands-On Haiti program. While providing direct services is deeply rewarding and close to our hearts, we recognize that in the long term, training practitioners in Haiti to provide these services is the most sustainable and meaningful use of resources.

Click to view an update from Amber on the progress in Haiti.

 

Description of programs: Life Rhythms Project

This program brings therapeutic drumming circles; healing ceremonies that integrate drumming, movement, centering yoga, somatic awareness, mindfulness-based practices and creative arts; and creative arts, contemplative and movement-and-rhythm- based activities, rituals and practices to acknowledge, recognize and support healing and restoration to communities suffering the effects of trauma. Integrating ceremonial arts from many years of study and immersion with spiritual teachers, shamans, and traditional healers in Haiti, the US, Norway, Indonesia, Nepal, and elsewhere, ceremonies have been created and offered created for survivors of torture, refugees, Veterans and service members returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and World War 2, and street children. See photos of this project, in partnership with Athletique D’ Haiti, and Beyond the Yellow Rhythm in our photo gallery!

 

Description of programs: Trauma & Resiliency Program

This program provides direct services, where appropriate, to survivors of natural disasters, human rights abuses, and violence. These services are provided in large group or community-based contexts, and include “on site” training, so that work can continue beyond the scope of the intervention. Direct services are only provided where and when it is possible to empower individuals, organizations, and communities to continue the work on their own. An example of this work is large group dance/movement therapy interventions with street children in Haiti, with local staff present who can also be trained to continue the work. Click to see photos of this work.

Trauma & Resiliency Training Program: In partnership with RRT&C, provides a training series in The CenterPost Trauma & Resiliency Framework and other courses , such as:

1. Tending the Helper’s Fire: Mitigating Secondary Trauma in Individuals and Organizations
2. Prop Shop: A Workshop on Balls, Bands and Boards
3. Introduction to Continuum as Self-Care and Embodied Practice
4. Introduction to Authentic Movement: The Witness in Healing and Action
5. Restoring our Core Rhythmicity: Working with Movement and Music with Survivors of Trauma
6. Trauma and the Body: An introduction to Body-Based Approaches to Healing
7. Working with Child Survivors of Torture, War and Trauma
8. Clinical Work with Survivors of Torture
9. Mindfulness and Psychotherapy