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Cultivating Resiliency for Syrian Refugees

January 16, 2015

While refugees fleeing violence in Syria most definitely need concrete relief — food, clothing, shelter — they also need something that is too often overlooked and out of reach: peace of mind. To help Syrian refugees process and heal from the trauma they’ve experienced, UUSC is partnering with the Trauma Resource Institute (TRI) to offer an upcoming Community Resiliency Training in Istanbul, Turkey, for 25 providers working with Syrian refugees.

After many years of successful collaboration in supporting people affected by humanitarian crises, TRI and UUSC will hold a five-day train-the-trainers session January 26–30 at Bahçeşehir University. A team from TRI will present their Community Resiliency Model (CRM) to help participants create “trauma-informed” and “resiliency-informed” communities that share a common understanding of the impact of trauma and chronic stress on the nervous system.

Not only that, participants will learn how resiliency can be restored or increased through CRM’s suite of body-based skills that treat the debilitating effects of trauma — and they’ll learn how to effectively teach it to the Syrian refugees they work with.

Confirmed training participants include five psychologists from the Turkey Psychologists Association and five members a small community of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in southeast Turkey that work with Yazidi and Kurdish refugees from Syria. Two local coordinators have been assisting with logistics and recruitment efforts, which have included reaching out to local and international NGOs in addition to conducting outreach via social media.

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