Our Story
I recognised that look of panic in their eyes because I was a child refugee. Like them, my family and I were forced to leave behind everything we knew and loved to save our lives, when Afghanistan’s civil war forced us to flee our country in 1992, when I was 11.”
Amna Co-founder Zarlasht Halaimzai
Our methodology is simple, and evidence-based-we create safe and playful spaces where people can convene and heal as a community. Our aim is to provide care as early as possible to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma, that can affect individuals and communities for a long time.
By 2019, our work was recognised by the WHO and the UN as a best-practice model, and we began scaling by partnering with local organisations. Since then, we have expanded beyond Greece, supporting displaced communities in 23 countries across MENA, Europe and Asia, including in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Today, Amna is building a global movement of healing – training frontline workers, supporting community-led initiatives, and advocating for better mental health care for refugees.
Since 2016, we’ve provided therapeutic support to over 48000 people, and touched lives of over 2.4 million and we’re just getting started.
Amna’s story begins in Greece in 2015, where our founder Zarlasht Halaimzai, herself a former refugee, began offering community-based psychosocial support to the refugees arriving after harrowing journeys across the Aegan Sea.
As the crisis deepened in 2016, thousands of refugees found themselves stranded at the borders of Greece and North Macedonia. Zarlasht, along with a small team of counsellors, set up a tent and began offering therapeutic group sessions for men, women, and children. Recognizing the urgent need for long-term mental health support, they cofounded Refugee Trauma Initiative (RTI)—the organization that would later become Amna.
Over the next few years, as refugees continued to arrive, our work grew to meet the needs of displaced communities in Greece. Working together with refugees and psychosocial experts, we developed our current programming–nonclinical community-based interventions that help make people who have experienced violence and forced displacement feel safe again.
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