Green String Network (GSN)

Our vision is to scale up GSN’s approach across East Africa and the Horn through partnerships with implementers on the ground and visionary funders who are aligned with our mission while diversifying our revenue streams to increase our sustainability and stability. We would use the Elevate Prize to help us build this capacity to take this next step in our development helping us build new partnerships with United Nations programs and governments regionally.  We particularly love the idea of South to South initiatives rather than the typical development model of core-periphery.

In the coming five years we believe we will have partnerships in other African countries. The Elevate Prize would be a key step to helping us accomplish this vision.  Africa is in turmoil, deep conflict issues, chronic violence in and social healing is a missing element across the board. We have seen that trauma is not only a consequence of violence, it is also a source of continued instability. Turmoil in Africa post-COVID19 will lead to new conflicts and protracted violence, large-scale migration, IDPs, and refugee crises.  The Elevate Prize would help us to scale up the model through partnerships with local grass-root organizations and other key stakeholders.

My name is Angi Yoder-Maina. I am a Kenyan-American living in Nairobi. I am the Executive Director of the Green String Network. We work regionally throughout East Africa in Kenya, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. We are a social movement working with communities and the police to heal social and collective traumas. 

We use storytelling, art, and embodied practices to help people articulate the traumas they have experienced, and recognize how these experiences shape their behavior using these methods to unlock new ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling, so that they can live more full and peaceful lives as individuals and communities.

The healing process is the first and fundamental step towards building peace, wellbeing, and prosperity in the long term. GSN fills the gap between peacebuilding, mental health, and development, drawing on evidence of what works in each of these fields to deliver an approach that is unique.

All of this adds up to the process of collective social healing. It is often the missing piece that allows us to build the foundations for well-functioning and cohesive institutions, communities, countries. This is what makes peace work. Wellbeing inspires welldoing. 

Violence causes deep social hurts, deep collective traumas, stopping people from being able to live fully and healthily as individuals and communities.

Without healing these underlying hurts, wounds fester, and become chronic: violence becomes cyclical. We need to heal the collective traumas existing in communities if we are to build peace, prosperity, and wellbeing.

The dominant approaches to addressing community mental health needs

• Are biomedical, pathologizing responses to trauma and divorcing these experiences from broader structural and historic factors, such as violence, inequality, and poverty.

• Are individualized, focusing on an individual’s experiences without taking into account how they fit into collective experiences.

• Are not contextualized, replicating western models of care or intervention that do not meet the needs, expectations, and practices of African communities.

These approaches combine to blame people for the mental health challenges they experience, without considering the structural, collective, and local dimensions of these challenges. They block opportunities for communities to create their own solutions and trap individuals in labels, without creating pathways for meaningful, long-term healing.

Instead, we need non-biomedical, collective, and contextualized approaches to healing trauma. This is the gap that GSN fills in East Africa and the Horn.

At GSN we are uniquely positioned in the gap between peacebuilding, mental health, and development, drawing on evidence of what works in each of these fields to deliver a powerful, integrated approach with demonstrated impact. Our trauma-informed approach links recovery and humanitarian aid to peace and development. Yet few organizations have developed sustainable, culturally relevant, grass-root trauma-informed interventions outside of the global north.

• We create spaces that privilege expertise that comes with lived experience – not only the voices of ‘experts'.

• We build on the existing strengths, resources, and resiliencies of the communities we work with. We believe they have the tools to solve their own problems and we facilitate that process.

• We take a multidisciplinary, multisectoral, and intersectional approach. We bring together lots of different kinds of knowledge combining them in unusual ways.

• We use creative methods, including illustrations, stories, and folk tales. We believe art and creativity are hugely powerful tools for humanizing those we see as “other”, bridge differences and allowing people to access their inner selves.

• We are always evolving. We are not afraid to try new things, and don’t let ourselves get ‘stuck’ in what we know works.

Evidence-based research is foundational. We have learned, through our work, participants are able to:

• Think differently: Recognise and understand their experiences of trauma and how it has shaped them – how they respond to the world, what triggers them.

• Feel differently: Develop their own self-regulation strategies. Learning how to regulate their nervous system – and be able to pass this knowledge onto others.

• Identify differently: Find new ways of telling their story that moves away from narratives of victimhood, creating positive stories that deconstruct ‘us vs them’ mentalities. 

• Interact differently: Build new patterns of behavior for dealing with and resolving conflict.

• Behave differently: Become leaders in their communities, and engender their healing. GSN’s work provides an initial impetus that can then continue with its own momentum - a ripple effect of healing.

• Live differently: Our work creates the conditions for trust across society: between individuals; between communities; between people and institutions.

All of this adds up to the process of collective social healing. It is the missing piece that allows us to build the foundations for well-functioning and cohesive institutions, communities, countries. This is what makes peace work. 

Since 2017 we have served 13,463 direct participants, 93,302 indirect beneficiaries in Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan/Sudan in over 20 communities, holding 3,614 community healing sessions and 1,460 participants in 72 Wellbeing and Resilience (WebR) Leadership workshops, working with 174 sustainable agents of community resilience and strength. 

Since GSN started we have tracked the number of indirect participants in the monitoring and evaluation process as each participant is tasked with sharing the lessons learned in the program with family members, friends, and neighbors. They are given materials to do so, with picture books highlighting trauma awareness and the community’s cycle of violence. Key participants include youth leaders, at-risk youth, women's groups, GBV survivors, religious leaders, disabled groups like the hearing-impaired, police officers, and the business community. Our experience in Kenya is that each direct participant talks to around 17 others and in Somalia participants talk to around 30 indirect beneficiaries. 

In 2022 our annual target is 3,789 direct and 75,780 indirect in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. We believe that these numbers are possible as we pivot to our new scaling model of working with local partners to expand the healing-centered peacebuilding model. 

GSN has a multifaceted model with a strong theoretical underpinning, making use of lots of creative methods. We have a strong evidence base for our work, including both quantitative evaluation data and a rich bank of human stories.

In general, we use a process of evidence-based learning and the current results from a multi-year engagement in the Majengo neighborhood in Nairobi and in Mombasa showed significant decreases in distress symptoms, more trust, more interaction with "other groups",  more willingness to have former gang leaders return to the community, and participants reported better support systems in general after the 12-week intervention. 

Additionally, the program gives rise to activities initiated through the participants or through community leaders. We have recorded a wide range of events and activities such as a participant who developed radio programs focused on healing and violence, town hall meetings where participants are asked to speak about the program lessons, and other events focused on youth, preventing/countering violent extremism, female genital mutilation (FMG), and even women’s role in society.

We published our first Impact Report in November 2019. If you are interested in the research you can find it here on our webpage. https://www.green-string.org/i....

Technically GSN has always been viewed as a peacebuilding organization - not a mental health one. The goal in the coming year is for GSN to become recognized as a mental health organization as well, in order to open more opportunities for funding and new collaborations. With a new revenue stream and funding from Grand Challenges Canada (GCC), one of the most prominent global mental health funders we believe this will change. We will use the spotlight from the Elevate Prize to highlight our mental health capacity.

We currently have both financial and technical barriers to scale our model, GSN plans to work with local partners in new geographical locations, who will own and drive their local healing processes. GSN’s focus will be on supporting content and program development, capacity building and training of new network partners, and learning and evaluation which comes from the collaborative partnership; with the local partners in charge of leading the implementation of the programming.  Our scaling module is still in its infancy and one of the reasons we are seeking the Elevate award is to have external support on how to take our work to scale.

We would look forward to building a tailored media campaign with the support of the Elevate prize in order to articulate our unique approach to mental health, peacebuilding, and development – which is non-biomedical, non-Western, and linked to the structural forces of violence, poverty, and power.

Documented evidence for our work. GSN staff has carried out research in fragile, insecure areas. With support from psychologists, a multi-disciplinary approach is taken in our program assessments. Measurement instruments are designed, utilizing behavioral and psychological scales along with questions related to socio-economic, political, and conflict-related indicators. Because the healing-centered / trauma-informed approach to peacebuilding is not well understood or tested, GSN has invested significantly in the study of the populations we serve and the outcomes of the interventions. 

We have data sets from Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan, and Ethiopia looking at frequency and types of exposure to violence and other traumatic events, behavior-related wellness or resilience, behavior related to peace and conflict, attitudes related to peace and conflict, and levels of mental distress and traumatic stress symptoms. It could be extremely beneficial to publish several academic papers, using the existing evidence base.

At GSN our team combines passion and lots of different kinds of knowledge. Our leadership team is a reflection of our larger team who brings together peacebuilders, psychologists, embodied practitioners, police officers, artists, storytellers, filmmakers, researchers, teachers, parents, young people, community leaders, as well as, people with lived experience. 

We are an intergenerational team, with lots of young people in it. This makes us unafraid of failure and excited to innovate. This diversity of perspective and expertise is one of our greatest strengths.

Our healing movement is driven by local network partners and their community volunteer who focuses on providing a safe space for participants to explore issues of violence, the effects of trauma, and healing

Our values focus on the transformative power of what is often overlooked - the courage and grace of ordinary people; the communal impulse to be whole again; the will to move past the ravages of violence; and the cultural wealth of traditions and practices of healing. 

We give emphasis is given to narratives that help individuals and groups break cycles of violence, developing community-led healing initiatives. We engage leadership at all levels in an effort to support individual, collective and social healing.

Professionalized mental health care is never going to be scalable, globally let alone in limited-resource settings in conflict-affected communities, and informal settlements in East Africa and the Horn. In many places, it is either not culturally desired, affordable, or both. For GSN, this means finding ways to innovating the integration of peacebuilding and governance work with mental health from an African worldview, in new and creative ways. 

Our leadership team and our larger "brain trust' all have lived experience including as survivors of domestic violence, former street kids, victims of police brutality, the impact of being human rights defenders, and peacebuilders in environments where the civil society space is increasingly limited, and persons living with disabilities. We have police officers engaging with former violent criminals. And our artists are documenting our past, the present, and our dreams for a better future. As our movement grows we have more stories of resilience, social healing, and transformation.

As we collectively examine issues of distress, we need new narratives of shared distress to replace the failed one of individual disorders. We need human connection and mutual support.  We are shifting the conversation in East Africa and globally.  

The onset of COVID-19 was testing times for many mental health and peacebuilding projects globally. For GSN, COVID-19 meant that our face-to-face activities, such as peer support groups, had to be stopped, and planned funding was paused, as funders thought planned objectives could no longer be met. The situation in Kenya became increasingly difficult and personal for us, as we experienced the loss of friends and family, as well as a positive case within the office. The pandemic forced us to rapidly rethink our programming.

As a team, we pulled together and adapted our peer support to an online space. With this came challenges around individuals being comfortable with receiving support online and ensuring that the same unique connection and relationship are reached in person can be recreated via a screen. Today as the 3rd wave starts we are offering national virtual peer support, almost fully self-funded. 

Moreover, the team realized COVID-19 information was not being tailored to the Kenyan context and was not reaching the most marginalized communities. In response, we developed information that was contextually appropriate.  We produced artwork on how to wear a mask specifically tailored to Muslim communities, which takes into account beards and headwear. https://drive.google.com/file/...

Mama Zuria's back story - https://youtu.be/9xsKFQFtbdw

Kumechuca: It's a New Dawn, Mama Zuria Story - https://youtu.be/CYDc9_6dxyY

Ahmed Ibrahim's Story - https://youtu.be/pUXQE-OxNvA

Quraca Nabadda: Tree of Peace (Somalia) - https://youtu.be/JXsQtudaC3E

Why GSN invests in deep contextual adaptation (a draft still in production) - https://youtu.be/Wda2al1V1z4

GSN, with its groundbreaking healing-centered peacebuilding practice, is emerging into supporting organizations to develop trauma-informed internal systems.  Organizational culture is the foundation of success – a peacebuilding organization without a deep-rooted culture of healing cannot sustainably teach the same in communities.  Yet people come to organizations with a lifetime of experiences that do not provide them with these skills.  Working in peacebuilding creates compassion fatigue and burnout, which is exacerbated when the organization’s culture does not support healing.

GSN’s next big leap (which Elevate funding will support)  is in transforming our own culture - taking the principles and wisdom we teach in communities into our HR/admin policies and processes, leadership, and strategy - so as to be able to teach that to our network partners. 

This means teaching on levels of a) the practice of healing-centered community peacebuilding (our model), and b) the internal learning and building of self, organizational, and community-care culture.  When GSN can teach other organizations on these levels, it will lay the foundation for a future leap: coaching emergent high-capacity peacebuilding organizations to teach other organizations on multiple levels as well. 

This will create an outward-reaching spiral of healing cultures that create healing cultures.

One of our most exciting partners is the young Fintech company called Onkout. It is an ethical, standalone, culturally sensitive digital wallet and payment system, using technology to make transactions secure. Furthermore, Onkout engages rotating traditional savings and credit groups who can now access wellbeing and collective healing support from their smartphones (from GSN). As the peer-support groups are integrated and hosted on the Onkout platform, we are connecting micro-economic gains in Somalia (and soon in Kenya and beyond) to tangible improvements in livelihoods to issues of wellbeing and collective social healing.  

Diplomats For Health In Resilient Community (DfHRC) and SambaSports Youth Agenda (Samba) are partners on the proof-of-concept award with Grand Challenges Canada. We are also in talks with the Global Opportunity Youth Network who are reducing unemployment for opportunity 

Somali Youth Development Network (SOYDEN), Somali Gender Equity Movement (SGEM), and Action for Social and Economic Progress (ASEP) are long-term Somali partners who are working with GSN and Onkout on developing both virtual and physical peer support groups.

Other partners in Kenya include the Water Fund, Nairobi Water, Coalition for Action for Preventive Mental Health (CAPMH), COVID19 Kenya Volunteers, International Justice Mission-Kenya, National Police Service (NPS), and the National Police Wifes Association (NAPOWA).