Behavioral Health Support for Ukrainian Refugees

Kira Mauseth is organizing this fundraiser.

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Hi friends,

My colleague, Dr. Tona McGuire and I are raising money to take the Health Support Team (HST) to Poland to support the Ukrainian refugees arriving daily. We have been asked by our hosts, the voivodship regional coordinators in South-Eastern Poland, to provide this curriculum as soon as possible to local volunteers and students, as well as other clinical professionals who can aid the refugees in managing their experiences.

HST is a behavioral health training program that provides evidence-based best practices for disaster relief WITHIN affected communities. It is a model that engages local trainers who are familiar with the language, customs, background and local culture. The HST curriculum has been trained successfully in Haiti after the great quake of 2010 and in Jordan with both Syrian and Palestinian refugees.

In this case, we will be training both Polish and Ukrainian students and volunteers on how to provide practical and effective behavioral health tools and interventions for people who are surviving through war and displacement traumas associated with the current invasion.

We provide the initial training for local trainers, and they adapt the material to make it culturally relevant and appropriate in support of the community they are working with. Then they continue the support by training additional volunteers. The program becomes self-contained and sustainable from WITHIN the affected communities.

To learn more about HST, see the Health Support Team website and please consider supporting this work.

All monies donated for this GoFundMe will be used to directly support training expenses for HST, including our upcoming initial trip and follow-up consultation with trainers in Poland.

Below are some photos of examples of the training we have done in Jordan in recent years: