In a nutshell, here’s what we do:
We offer a program for individual and community wellbeing. Our team of facilitators implements the program where people want their own lives and the lives of their community members to be better. These people are everywhere!
We define a “peer community” as a group of people who can hear and understand each other well because they have experiences in common. Painful experiences and emotionally charged topics can very often be resolved without medical interventions of any kind whatsoever.
And so, we equip people who have had similar experiences with a system based on telling their stories, being heard and fully understood. We are seeing awesome life changes. Program participants are resolving the impact of their trauma, making peace with the past and with themselves and others, and they are finding that they are able to move on and live meaningful and productive lives. Some are choosing to help us to do this great work. They do our Program Facilitator Training and join our team or implement the program as representatives of the organizations we partner with.
The Shift From the Authority of Experts to the Innate Wisdom of Individuals and Communities
One of the world's most abundant resources, those who have been traumatized, can themselves pave the way to building a better future. It is possible for communities to regain the promise of our human birthright to activate our potential and pursue a purposeful life. Communities can change conditions at the grass roots level.
Our PeerCommunity CoCare Program teaches individuals in traumatized communities how to help each other. Within a structure and forum of safety they can tell and resolve their stories and thus bring about their mutual healing and the restoration of community resilience.
The program has been designed for communities who need and want to rebuild and return to strength, health, self-determination, and successful self-reliance.
The program uses the fundamentals of an evidence-based cognitive narrative approach called TIR, which can be taught to anyone who wishes to help themselves and others. With the recognition that we are each the expert and authority on our own experience and are endowed with innate wisdom, we become, without intrusion, the agents and arbiters of our own healing.
We each have our own personal experience of the events of our lives.
We must tell our stories.
We must listen to each other.
This telling and this listening is our path to individual and, thus, community health and strength.
Non-Medical, Non-Religious
The PeerCommunity Program is a non-medical, non-diagnostic, non-pathologizing and, therefore, non-stigmatizing option to changing conditions for the better. We don't ask what's wrong, we simply ask... actually, teach the individuals in the community to ask, "What happened?" In a safe and entirely non-judgmental space, with no distraction or intrusion, and within the context of their own world view, their own cultural and religious values, their own understanding of their origin and spirituality, individuals in diverse communities can explore, find meaning, and resolve past and present challenges.
The very real possibility of health and peace in functioning communities exists. By appraising the tremendous challenges, posing the right problems, and applying the solutions to overcome them, community programs are making an impact. We can turn the tide and gain ground, given the right tools to work with.
PeerCommunity: A group of people who have experienced the same or similar adverse life experience or a peer group who have the best chance of hearing and understanding each other.
Communities are helping themselves by individual members helping each other to put the past where it belongs, in the past, reclaim their lives, and regain their resilience and ability to attend to life and find pleasure in living. Through co-care in pairs to bring about individual healing, the community is engaging in community self-care.
We constantly collect and analyze our data. We are showing the world that this approach works through pre and posttests, evaluations, and testimonials - a model for healing for communities globally.
The program is highly structured. With clear objectives determined by the community, we achieve them step-by-step.
When completed, the community may own the program and replicate it as they need to and wish to.
Each time our PeerCommunity Program is implemented in a community, they give it a name that reflects their hopes and expectations for the program.
The program materials have been translated into the following languages:
Spanish, Mandarin, European French, Haitian Creole, and Dari. Some of the workshop materials have been translated into isiZulu, Sepedi, Xhosa, Afrikaans, and other South African languages.
Summary of results of individual programs available upon request.
“Let people tell their story, tell of their pain. And let others listen. We discovered that in the telling, people begin to experience a healing.”
“Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery.
When the “action of telling a story” has come to its conclusion, the traumatic experience truly belongs to the past.
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“A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well intentioned words.”
“I don’t need you to fix me. I just need you to listen to me.
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“If we are able to be good listeners, we will discover that it is possible for people to heal themselves.”
“Therapy is about people resolving their own internal world.
People come to their own wisdom and resolve their experience.
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