Sanar Institute

Sanar's mission is simple - healing from trauma is a fundamental human right. Trauma comes in many forms, is often misunderstood, and has been highly stigmatized. As someone with my own lived expertise in trauma healing, and as trauma therapist who is honored to lead an NGO paving the way to resiliency. I am applying for the Elevate Prize to increase access to evidence-based, mental health care that allows each of us to truly heal.

Receiving the Elevate Prize would allow Sanar to expand and scale healing spaces that offer empowering and inclusive access to lifechanging, evidence-based, mental healthcare with the ultimate goal of removing stigma from the trauma narrative and rewriting a story of resilience for all of us impacted by traumatic events. 

There are very few of us whose lives are untouched by trauma. Access to healing, however, has been far more selective process than the universal presence of traumatic events and is determined by financial resources and the geography in which we were born.

 Funding through the Elevate Prize would provide the resources to strengthen and expand mental health resources, trauma education, and engage in scalable solutions that allow all of us all a pathway to healing.  

My own story is intimately linked to the founding of the Sanar Institute. As an individual who experienced complex trauma across my life course I  frequently reflected on how my path might have changed if I had been met with different societal responses, embraced with appropriate and evidence-based mental health support, and witnessed positive examples of posttraumatic growth in the media. I grew up believing these traumatic events were shameful, something to hide, and unsure how to navigate the traumatic responses (such as anxiety) in my life. 

In my 20's I was fortunate to have people in my pathway that created spaces for me to heal. Healing created the space for to focus on collective impact, driven by personal my own mission of creating meaningful access to healing through mental health care. 

The past thirteen years have of my life have been dedicated to understanding every aspect of how we heal and putting this into action through direct services and capacity strengthening initiatives. My vision is that individuals and communities have access to these services, supports, and empowering narratives of posttraumatic growth so each person can reclaim the space of trauma with their own personal mission inspired by their healing.

Sanar is dedicated to healing interpersonal violence. In the 2019 World Report on Violence and Health by the World Health Organization interpersonal violence is identified as a leading, worldwide, public health crisis. The scope of interpersonal violence is vast yet frequently distilled down to domestic violence, sexual violence, human trafficking, and a few other hot button human rights violations. Yet what the data shows is that most individuals do not just experience ONE form of violence, they experience MANY. This phenomenon of complex trauma is exponentially increased in absence of trauma-specific mental health care that is scarcely available outside of affluent communities.  

Sanar works to fill this gap understanding that appropriate, safe, and empowering access to trauma care is essential not only for healing but also in interpersonal violence prevention. Sanar uses a three pronged approach to accomplish this goal at present: 1) Direct services through in-person and tele-mental health 2) Training and capacity strengthening for organizations 3) Healing community building through global NGO collaboratives that identify and create access to healing pathways that are culturally relevant. Sanar currently operates a wellness center in Newark, New Jersey and has led community building projects in Mexico, Haiti, Ghana, and India.

Sanar was founded to be bold and unflinching in our approach to healing trauma. We were founded on the premise that all services would be evidence-based, evaluated, and grounded in the goals of the individuals and communities we serve. In the past five years, Sanar has become one of the only organizations in the United States offering diverse evidence-based mental health and wellness services to individuals and communities impacted by interpersonal violence free of charge. Sanar offers modalities including EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Trauma-Sensitive Yoga, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and countless other psychotherapy approaches. 

In addition, Sanar recognizes that pathologizing trauma healing is counterproductive and part of the global problem. For far too long the skills and tools used in evidence-based practices have been reserved for individuals with the resources to attend graduate-level programs. The wisdom of lived expertise has been tokenized and trivial. Sanar committed to listen and build a capacity strengthen program that integrated diverse wisdom from research, lived experience, and communities. The result was a training program called Building Healing Relationships, the gives communities and individuals the tools to heal, moving away from a medical model that has frequently disempowered the very communities it it meant to serve. 

Sanar is seeks to rebrand the narrative on healing in diverse fields related to interpersonal violence. Taking both an individual and community approach allows our organization to maximize this impact through three distinct areas:

1. Creating healing pathways for individuals

2. Creating healing pathways for communities

3. Changing the trauma narrative from one of damage to resiliency 

At present, Sanar is increase direct service access through tele-mental health care as a key strategy towards growth, access, and meeting needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2020 Sanar has had nearly a 500% increase in request for individual mental health services both locally in the greater Newark and New York City Metro area, nationally, and globally. Sanar has worked with an external evaluator to assess outcome measure associated with healing. Our clinical team utilizes these measures to assess service impact that has been overwhelmingly effective in both trauma-response reduction and characteristics consistent with resiliency. 

In addition, Sanar has worked to build community healing programs globally that have sustained through the pandemic. One example includes the work Sanar has led sine 2018 in India supporting communities trafficked and exploited in the textile and garment industries that has sustained during the pandemic.