Amna envisions a world where refugees can shape their futures, free from the impact of trauma, conflict, and displacement.
Amna is a refugee-centred organisation working alongside communities affected by conflict and displacement to strengthen access to healing, safety and belonging.
We start with the knowledge, relationships and healing practices already present within communities. Our training helps local practitioners and organisations deepen trauma- and identity-informed care in ways that reflect their languages, cultures and lived experience. Training is part of a longer relationship: through accompaniment—ongoing mentoring, reflection and support—we help partners adapt learning to their day-to-day work, alongside funding where available.
Our approach brings evidence-based practice into conversation with cultural wisdom. Play, movement, storytelling and creative expression offer ways for people to connect, express themselves and begin to rebuild a sense of inner safety.
Our Healing Ecosystems approach builds on these relationships. We connect community-led care, developing local training pathways, organisational support and global peer learning so that care is strengthened around the people who need it. Our longer-term ambition is for locally led networks to embed healing-centred care in community life and the services people trust.
In 2015, as hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived on the shores of Lesbos after harrowing journeys across the Aegean Sea, our co-founder, Zarlasht Halaimzai, once a refugee herself, was among the volunteers offering psychological first aid.
“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.”
Read more about how Amna grew from a few volunteers to a global network.
