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.