Venesa Sulimani is an advocate for intergenerational trauma and the first person in Kosovo to speak openly about it. She is raising funds to bring trauma-informed care education and advocacy to Albanian and Kosovar communities, so that people like her don't have to spend years suffering without answers.

Venesa grew up in the shadow of the Kosovo War. Like many children of that time, she carried experiences she didn't yet have language for. What she witnessed as a child stayed with her, shaping her physical and mental health, and her sense of self in ways she couldn't understand for a long time.

For years after the war, she struggled. She sought help. But the healthcare system she turned to never asked about her past. No one connected what she was going through to what she had lived through. Without that piece of her history, she didn't receive the care she actually needed, and she is far from alone in that experience.

In Albanian and Kosovar communities, the impact of trauma doesn't end with the generation that lived it. It passes down through families, through silence, through bodies that hold what the mind can't yet say. And yet the healthcare systems many of them navigate were never built to see that.

Your support will go directly toward funding Venesa's advocacy efforts, all focused on building awareness of trauma-informed care. The goal is simple: that clinicians learn to look beyond symptoms, and that our community knows their story matters.