About Us

Our work began in a tent on the border of Greece and North Macedonia and is now growing globally. We deliver services that mitigate the impact of trauma and toxic stress. We focus on areas where we can make the most difference. Our play-based early childhood programme, Baytna supports whole family healing and our youth programme Dinami offers a safe space for young people. We also offer therapeutic support to men and women.
Now to scale our work, we’re partnering with community organisations around the world to offer trauma and identity informed psychosocial care to people affected by conflict and forced displacement. We invest in and train local organisations and connect them to a healing network that can support their practice
Our mission is to build community capacity for healing.
Our vision is refugees determining their futures, unbounded by the impacts of conflict and displacement.
Our Story
Amna began as Refugee Trauma Initiative (RTI).
In 2016 some 13,000 refugees were stranded on the border of Greece and North Macedonia. It’s here that our work began. We set up a tent and started providing therapeutic group sessions for men, women and children who experienced violence, displacement and torture.
As refugees continued to arrive, we grew to meet the need of displaced communities in Greece. We worked in camps, community centres and provided individual support when it was necessary.
We worked with refugees and psychosocial experts to develop our current programming – light touch nonclinical community-based interventions that help make people who have experienced violence and forced displacement feel safe again.
The methodology of our programmes is evidenced based and simple. We create safe and playful spaces where people can convene and heal as a community. Our aims is to provide care as early as possible to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma that can affect individual and communities for a long time.
After 6 years, we are providing this care through our healing network to refugees in Greece, Albania, Kosovo, Italy and Pakistan. We are building our network in Poland, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Afghanistan.
Our Board

Daniel Robinson
Chair of The Board

Lisa Jordan
Trustee

Abdulkarim Ekzayez
Trustee

Afsana Safa
Trustee

Cristina M. Finch
Trustee

Karim Bereksi
Treasurer

Daniel Robinson
Chair of The Board
Daniel is a barrister with a broad practice encompassing crime, road traffic and regulatory work. He is predominantly based in the Crown Courts, where he both prosecutes and defends.
Before coming to the Bar, Daniel worked for NGOs in the UK, Rwanda and Jamaica. His work encompassed genocide and war crimes, crimes against humanity and human rights in which he retains a strong interest. Daniel spent seven months working for the Council for Human Rights based in Kingston, Jamaica, and has advised defendants on Death Row as to their prospects of appeal to the Privy Council. He is experienced in representing defendants with mental health issues, addiction problems and vulnerabilities.

Lisa Jordan
Trustee
Lisa is a senior philanthropic executive with a twenty-year career focused on impact and systemic change. She serves as Managing Director of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, where she helps emerging organizations develop capacity and achieve impact, while also steering the Foundations overall strategy, thought-leadership, and outreach. Lisa is a senior philanthropic executive with a twenty-year career focused on impact and systemic change. She has worked with numerous foundations and family offices on program and portfolio development.

Abdulkarim Ekzayez
Trustee
Abdulkarim is a medical doctor and an epidemiologist from Syria. In 2013, Abdulkarim was training to be a neurosurgeon when his residency was interrupted by the war. He then worked in field hospitals in Aleppo and Idlib before joining Save The Children, where he led the health response in North West Syria until 2017. He is currently pursuing a PhD in health systems in war settings at King’s College London, in addition to his work as a research associate with the Conflict and Health Research Group at the same university. He is also an Associate fellow at Chatham House and serves on the board of two other organisations, Shafak, and Eyes to the Future.

Afsana Safa
Trustee
Afsana is a London-based General Practitioner (Family Physician) with first-hand experience of the European refugee crisis. Amna first met Afsana in 2016, when she travelled to Greece with the Syrian American Medical Society to set up and run medical clinics in refugee camps in the north of the country. She has also volunteered in Bangladesh with Rohingya refugees. Afsana’s other NHS roles include Clinical Cancer lead for North West London and Governing Body board member for Central London CCG.

Cristina M. Finch
Trustee
Cristina M. Finch currently serves as the head of the Gender and Security Division at DCAF – Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance. Cristina is a human rights lawyer and advocate with more than twenty five years of experience in advancing human rights in the areas of women’s and LGBTI rights, hate crimes, and discrimination. She is the former head of the Tolerance and Non-Discrimination Department at OSCE ODIHR and former managing director for the Identity and Discrimination Unit at Amnesty International USA, where she was at the forefront of successful efforts to expand human rights protections against sexual and gender-based violence. Cristina has also served as legal counsel to the Human Rights Campaign and the Congresses of both the United

Karim Bereksi
Treasurer
Karim is the board’s treasurer and an international development consultant. He advises clients including The World Bank, UN agencies and FCDO on a range of issues, working across a range of geographies; with a continued focus in fragile and (post-)conflict states. With a strong background in audit and finance, Karim focusses on assignments designed to help donors reduce fiduciary risks through improved oversight and governance mechanisms.
Karim holds a BSC in Mathematics and Finance and is a Chartered Accountant.
Our Team
Amna’s core team is made of psychosocial care specialists, early childhood experts and humanitarians. Lived experience is represented in all aspects of our organisation – from our board to our facilitators.

Zarlasht Halaimzai
Founder and CEO

Tina Hyder
Executive Director

Natalia Kyrkopoulou
Head of Operations

Gabriella Brent
Head of Programmes

Hajra Daly
Partnerships and Capacity Building Manager

Nsimire Bisimwa
Clinical Lead

Laramie Shubber
Communications and Digital Content Lead

Sandra El Gemayel
Learning, Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Officer

Iliana Dimoni
Finance Manager

Dea Zaimaj
Administration and HR Officer

Vassiliki Arabatzi
Training, Capacity Building Coordinator and Trainer

Christina Evgenidou
Youth Programme Lead

Nunu
ECD and Youth Facilitator

Zarlasht Halaimzai
Founder and CEO
Zarlasht founded Amna in 2016 after returning from the Syrian border, where she had advised INGOs on education and child wellbeing, to help refugees dealing with the emotional fallout of violence and displacement. She has worked for several aid organisations, including Save the Children. In the UK she has worked for the Young Foundation, the Studio Schools Trust and the Skills Lab – an education consultancy where she was a founding director. In 2018, Zarlasht was selected as a Fellow of the inaugural class of Obama Fellows, a group of 20 global leaders in civic innovation. Zarlasht and her family were forcibly displaced from Kabul when she was eleven years old. She arrived in the UK at age fifteen and was granted asylum.
“When I speak to people about our work I try to help them to understand the experience of displacement. It isn’t just physical displacement from home – it’s also an emotional fracture: you are separated from your family, your friends, and your language. That alone is difficult enough – most of the people have also lost a loved one and seen unimaginable violence. Starting over is only possible if they are supported through the transition.”

Tina Hyder
Executive Director
Tina Hyder was formerly Deputy Director of the Early Childhood Program of the Open Society Foundations, based in London. As Deputy Director, Tina helped forge partnerships to strengthen early childhood policies, research, networks and programs for young children and their families. Prior to joining OSF, Tina was a Global Adviser for Save the Children UK, supporting more than 50 country offices around the world to promote the rights of children affected by discrimination. Earlier work includes programming for children affected by conflict and other emergencies.

Natalia Kyrkopoulou
Head of Operations
As Head of Operations and co-founder of Amna Greece, Natalia is Amna’s chief representative for all dealings with Greek agencies, including local government and non-governmental organisations. She has several years of experience in the field, both at large international NGOs and local grassroots organisations, and is Amna’s leading advocate for developing sustainable programmes within Greece. Natalia also leads Amna’s capacity building arm, which provides consultancy and training to organisations to assist them in implementing practices of service delivery and staff care that are both trauma-informed and identity-informed. She speaks French, Greek and English.
“It is so important now to keep focused on the ongoing humanitarian situation here in Northern Greece. The challenges the refugees still face are enormous and complex. We’ve been focusing on the challenge of integration, and for that we need help from two sides: we need practitioners who can communicate with the refugees in their own language; and we need local people who understand the Greek social services system and who can advocate on behalf of the refugees here in Greece.”

Gabriella Brent
Head of Programmes
Gabriella is Amna’s Head of Programmes and is a transpersonal counsellor and psychotherapist. Gabriella oversees Amna’s training and capacity building programmes; Baytna, Dinami, therapeutic work with men and women and Amna’s humanitarian wellbeing capacity-building work – providing training and wellbeing support to other humanitarian organizations working with refugees.
Before working with Amna, Gabriella spent 15 years working across the UK in the NGO sector piloting and implementing more humane, trauma-informed, systemic models of care.
“I was drawn to work with refugees in part due to my family’s refugee history. I love collaborating and co-creating training and programmes with the communities we work with, aligned with Amna’s ethical values. Working with Amna is a constant exploration and growing process and I feel privileged and proud to be part of a refugee-led team, learning and co-creating safe, community spaces.”

Hajra Daly
Partnerships and Capacity Building Manager
Hajra is the Partnerships and Capacity Building Manager at Amna where her role is to engage with new partners to promote Amna’s values based, trauma and identity informed approach for refugee communities in new countries of operations.
She was formally the lead for Forced Migration at Comic Relief. In her role as the Portfolio Manager, Hajra designed and developed funding programmes including ‘Across Borders’, a programme to support people on the move as they made their migration journey from Middle East, North Africa into Europe. Prior to that, Hajra has managed diverse portfolios on a range of issues including Violence Against Women and Girls, Child Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking and Vulnerable Young People. She is currently a volunteer interpreter for LGBTI people seeking asylum in the UK.
“I am excited to join Amna at a critical stage when it is launching its new 5-year strategy. I love collaborative working and am looking forward to being a central part of Amna’s expansion and building a network of partners in new countries and communities.”

Nsimire Bisimwa
Clinical Lead
Nsimire is a Systemic & Family Psychotherapist and Clinical Lead at Amna. As Clinical Lead Nsimire manages Amna’s team of therapists and is responsible for clinical oversight and safeguarding for Amna’s therapeutic framework. Originally trained as a medical doctor, she has more than twenty years of experience working with refugees and involuntarily displaced people in different organisations and settings.
Originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, her experiences have shown her the devastating effects that oppression, migration, dislocation, losses and trauma can have on the physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing of individuals and refugee communities.
Nsimire is a social justice and human right activist, and is against any kind of injustice, oppression, discrimination and human right violation. In her practice and teaching, she promotes ethical and anti-oppressive practices because she believes that there is a direct correlation between wellbeing, social inequalities and oppression.
Associate therapists
Our associate therapists work on a rotating basis to provide therapeutic assistance to the communities that we serve.

Romy Wakil
Consultant Therapist

Mahyar Zaud
Psychotherapist

Avesta Panahi
Psychologist

Asma Naurozi
Counsellor

Marianna Fiotaki
Dance Movement Therapist

Sarah Helander
Integrative Music Psychotherapist

Christina Gougouli
Dance Movement Therapist

Denisa Ndreka
Psychoanalyst and Psychodynamic Therapist

Dhurata Nixha
Psychologist

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