Confronting Trauma as a Systemic Force Across the SDGs

With Julia Pettengill from The Schooner Foundation

TRANSCRIPT

CMHI: So from the earliest days of our foundation we've brought a deeply psychosocial lens to our work. And what's become increasingly clear over time is that mental health can't be understood or addressed in isolation. It isn't a silo, you know. So for us, whether we're funding education, public health, human rights, we've just realized that we’re invariably confronting trauma and mental health, not as a singular event, but as a systemic force.

Julia Pettengill: And this insight has led us to invest in approaches that not only acknowledge trauma and mental health, but seek to transform systems in which they are embedded. We believe our responsibility as funders is to support care ecosystems that restore this agency and affirm dignity in individuals, and really enable both individual and collective healing. And you know, when I think about what's happening in the world today, you know, we've got this cascade of intersecting and compounding crises.

We've got armed conflict, forced displacement, ecological devastation, rising Authoritarianism. And these aren't just political or structural phenomenon. They're profoundly psychological. They fracture meaning and rupture relationships and undermine the basic conditions of belonging and trust for people. You know, I think about our partnerships but our partners really reflect this understanding.

We've learned from organizations like Trust Africa and the Zimbabwe Alliance, what it means to build trauma informed movements for justice. How do you address mental health for human rights defenders? You know, we’ve supported Wandikweza in rural Malawi, where community health workers deliver holistic, family centered care that recognizes mental health as integral to well-being. Schooners working has worked in Jordan for the last six years where we fund SAMS, the Syrian American Medical Society, and they deliver frontline care that integrates medical, psychosocial and community based support to Syrian refugees.

And they host communities.