Funding a volunteer mental health therapist is crucial to ensuring the best care provided to vulnerable youth. This volunteer's expertise on trauma-informed care will increase the effectiveness of our projects and have a long-lasting impact on the capacity of the organisation to provide trauma-informed trainings to local fieldworkers, teachers, facilitators and more. Raising the quality of psychosocial support services is essential to ensuring refugee children and youth in Jordan are supported.
UNHCR estimates over a million refugees reside in Jordan. Living below the poverty line they face child labour, child marriage and gender-based violence, discrimination and distress from displacement and the breakdown of community ties. Refugees are vulnerable to mental illness, with 35% of urban refugees reporting reduced functioning in their daily activities due to emotional distress. Marginalised and vulnerable youth have little opportunity for recreation, play and healing.
This project will fund Laurie, a mental heath specialist, to educate, train and supervise Capoeira al-Shababi's fieldworkers who are providing refugee youth with psychosocial support. Laurie will build the knowledge and skills of the trainers to provide trauma-informed care, ensure their own self-care, and support the capacity of the organisation to deliver high-quality psychosocial support projects. This will enhance the long-term effectiveness of therapeutic care to vulnerable youth in Jordan.
Laurie hopes to utilize her experience in program management and development to assist in developing trainings around trauma informed care, as well as assisting Capoeira al-Shababi in continuing to develop a compassionate organizational culture for employees and volunteers through mentoring programs and robust employee trainings. This will ensure that Capoeira al-Shababi provides a high-level of care-giving and support to its beneficiaries and other field workers in Jordan.
