Course image Trauma and Violence Informed Care
School of Public Health

Trauma & Violence Informed Care:

Trauma is both the experience of, and a response to, an overwhelmingly negative event or series of events, from wars and disasters to accidents and loss. Events are traumatic due to complex interactions between someone’s neurobiology, their previous experiences of trauma and violence, and the influence of broader community and social structures.

In this course you will be able to cover the following key aspects:

  1. Present key concepts underpinning trauma- & violence- informed care (TVIC)
  2. Provide a brief overview of trauma and violence and their impacts on care seekers and providers
  3. Start shifting practice approaches to TVIC
  4. TVIC Principles
  5. Vicarious trauma
  6. TVIC in Action – trauma review exercise (small groups & brief report-back)

Course image Narrative Therapy & Community Work Course
School of Public Health

Narrative therapy is a respectful, non-blaming approach to counselling and community work, which centres people as the experts in their own lives. It views problems as separate from people and assumes people have many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that will assist them in reducing the influence of problems in their lives. Narrative approaches to therapy and community work are used by social workers, psychologists, community development workers, nurses, teachers, doctors and other health professionals in a wide range of practice settings. 

The one-year course in Narrative Therapy and Community Work provides formal training and recognition for narrative therapy and is delivered as a joint initiative of the Centre for Mental Health, SOS Children's Villages Rwanda and the Geruka Healing Centre.  The training program seeks to enable participants to develop basic skills in narrative practice and to gather a working knowledge of how the art of narrative practice is engaged differently in a diversity of contexts. Significantly, it also seeks to challenge participants to innovate their own forms of narrative practice. Participants are therefore invited to contribute to an ever-increasing diversity of narrative practice (rather than only confirming, or conforming to, what is already known).