Gabriella Brent, CEO of the Amna Refugee Healing Network, provides safe spaces and trauma-informed support for people experiencing displacement and loss. She emphasizes that mental health care in humanitarian settings is often missing, inadequate, or overly clinical, focusing on diagnosis instead of helping people build safety and stability. Amna’s model was developed with refugee communities to meet people where they are and to offer practical, culturally grounded tools for collective healing.

Amna’s work includes:

• Creating regular, structured spaces where displaced people can reconnect through predictable routines, familiar songs, and creative activities such as music, storytelling, and movement.
• Training local facilitators and organizations—often refugee-led—to deliver trauma and identity informed care tailored to each cultural context.
• Using alternative feedback methods like focus groups and PhotoVoice to better understand participants’ experiences without overburdening them with formal surveys.
• Supporting partners to embed emotional regulation and co-regulation practices into their programs, improving team wellbeing and safeguarding.

Amna’s community-centered approach has strengthened the skills and confidence of local facilitators and improved participants’ sense of  belonging and self-regulation. The organization also focuses on redefining what counts as evidence of healing and on integrating learning processes that themselves provide therapeutic benefit.

Brent cautions against relying on rigid, one-size-fits-all models and highlights the need for humility and flexibility in humanitarian mental health work. Healing, she explains, must honor both the individuality of each person’s experience and the collective strength that comes from community connection.

Cristal Palacios Yumar of the Amna Refugee Healing Network describes how the organization supports refugee and displaced communities through collective healing rooted in creativity, culture, and belonging. Instead of relying on individual therapy models, Amna helps communities revive traditional practices of connection and emotional regulation as foundations for wellbeing.

In Ukraine and across Eastern Europe, Amna works with partners to help schools and community organizations design their own trauma- and identity-informed approaches to care. By allowing teachers, students, and families to identify their needs and lead the process, Amna helps build systems that are both responsive and sustainable. Small, context-specific actions—such as creating spaces for staff to rest and recharge—sit alongside larger initiatives like schoolwide training on trauma-informed practices, all guided by those within the system.

Amna’s work includes:

• Partnering with local organizations to co-create and fund community-led healing programs.
• Supporting transformation plans in Ukrainian schools to strengthen wellbeing and belonging.
• Collaborating with partners in Kosovo and Poland to expand mental-health support for young adults rebuilding after conflict.
• Providing reflective and wellbeing spaces for practitioners to strengthen emotional resilience and prevent burnout.

Adapting models to rapidly shifting contexts remains a challenge, particularly in contexts like Palestine, where connectivity and security disrupt traditional approaches. Palacios emphasizes that long-term impact depends on flexibility, trust in local leadership, and funding structures that enable communities to define and sustain their own healing.

At Amna, programs officer Alexandra Mylrea Lowndes supports two pillars of the organization's strategy: Systems of Care, which takes up most of her time, and the Global Healing Network. Amna is a trauma-informed healing organization, and the Systems of Care pillar was designed around the recognition that trauma can become embedded in systems — reinforcing or inflicting harm across institutions and communities. Currently, the pillar focuses on the education system, with two yearlong pilot programs: one working with organizations in Ukraine serving children ages 0 to 18, and one working with organizations in Poland and Kosovo focused on emerging adults ages 18 to 32.

The work is grounded in co-creation and local agency. Rather than arriving with a predetermined framework, Amna works with partner organizations to develop transformation plans suited to their own contexts. The approach includes:

• Running trainings with cohorts of partner organizations — referred to as Amna fellows — that function as spaces for co-creation, with partners running sessions for each other and Amna learning alongside them.
• Supporting partners to map their systems, conduct interviews and questionnaires with those within them, and identify where systems may not be trauma-informed or identity-informed.
• Embedding collective emotional regulation practices — including check-ins and checkouts — into all calls, trainings, and meetings, modeling the tools shared with partners rather than only teaching them.
• Maintaining predictability and transparency in all communications with partners, including clear information about travel grants, program timelines, and what to expect, as a way of walking the walk on trauma-informed practice.
• Convening the Global Healing Network, a peer learning network of partner organizations offering capacity building on topics including early childhood development techniques, creative healing tools, and grant writing.

Early insights from the Eastern European pilot have already informed the design of the Ukraine pilot. A small group size, Lowndes observed, allowed partners to cover significant ground quickly — a lesson that shaped how training time for the Ukraine cohort was structured to allow for rest and regulation. Partners in Kosovo have already begun developing questionnaires and planning interviews within a university.

Lowndes acknowledges that responding to the varied and shifting contexts partners operate in remains a constant challenge — from power cuts and connectivity issues in Ukraine to the inherent uncertainty of running pilots built on co-creation. She also reflects on the importance of ensuring that Amna's own communications and processes don't inadvertently reproduce the systems of harm the organization works to transform, noting that trauma-informed practice has to be present "in all of these different aspects" of how the organization operates — not only in its programs.