Stress costs.

We believe that people want to be doing their best work. They signed up to be humanitarians for a reason. But along the way, the workload, the long hours, the isolation, and the instability take their toll on your team. Now they spend too much time and too much energy trying to fix those things, instead of doing the work that matters. And everyone suffers for it. Your staff, your agency and ultimately the people you serve.

You can build a resilient team.

We offer a number of services to help you and your team focus and function, available in English and Turkish. Find out more about our staff support sessions, crisis support sessions, staff resilience workshops, and staff wellbeing policy and framework development below.

We know how challenging it can be to manage a team.

Managing a team is tough. You can find yourself caught between funders who want results, and your team members who are exhausted and at risk of burnout.

We know that pressure because we’ve been in the same boat. We’re two psychologists – Dr. Rebecca Dempster and Yesim-Arikut Treece – who joined forces to help humanitarian organizations support their staff. Collectively we have more than 35 years of experience as mental health experts, much of it in the humanitarian sector. We’ve managed teams all over the globe, helping them produce their best work while supporting them to be happy and healthy.

No matter where we’ve worked, we’ve been struck by two things: how dedicated so many humanitarians are, and how burnt out so many humanitarians are.

The dedication is what inspires us to keep working in this field. The burnout is what inspired us to create our staff support packages. We’ve taken everything we know about stress and resilience to create practical packages specifically designed to help humanitarian organizations support their staff.

If you want to give the most and get the most from your team, keep reading to learn how we can support you.

Staff Support Sessions

Our Staff Support Sessions offer an opportunity for your team members to process difficult experiences and emotions, and learn and practice resilience skills in a safe environment.

In our group sessions, we meet regularly with your team to give them space and support to build their resilience. Blending psycho-education with debriefing, we listen, provide support and feedback, and teach them a specific set of skills to manage stress and other painful emotions, tolerate conflict and adversity, develop self-compassion, and increase cognitive flexibility and inner strength. These group sessions can be adapted to your team size and context.

We know that group sessions aren’t always the best fit. When it’s not practical or desirable to conduct staff support sessions in a group, we are available for individual sessions with your team. We also blend the two, using group support sessions to build the team’s resilience and individual sessions to bolster learning and growth, and help individual staff members who may need more personalized support.

If requested, we can identify team members who can be mentored to take on the role of leading staff support sessions in your organization, eventually phasing out the need for our services.

Crisis Support Sessions

We offer individual and group sessions to help your team cope with critical security incidents. We take a flexible approach to these sessions, offering psycho-education about trauma and traumatic responses, therapeutic techniques to reduce the negative impact of critical incidents and increase post-traumatic growth, and strategies to help people identify and use their strengths and resilience.

Staff Resilience Workshops

Resilient teams are made up of resilient people. And resilient people have a distinct way of approaching the world. They adapt - in mind, body, and spirit - to the challenges that life throws at them. They view stress as an opportunity to grow. And it's this mindset - and the actions that go with it - that helps them cope with stress. Our Staff Resilience Workshops help your team learn to respond to stressful situations calmly and effectively.

It’s all about building more resilient teams and team members and that means:

Less stress and burnout in team members

More time and energy to focus on work

Less team conflict

More effective communication

Happier, healthier, and more productive staff

Staff Wellbeing Policy and Framework Development

We work at the organizational level to help you develop policies and practices that promote wellbeing in the workplace. Using standardized measures, we assess baseline levels of wellbeing and mental health among your team. Through key informant interviews and focus group discussions, we help you gain an understanding of the strengths and stressors across all levels of the organization. We work collaboratively to help you leverage opportunities – big and small – to create a healthier work environment that supports each team member to thrive.

Looking for support for yourself? Learn more about our Personalized Resilience Plans and online therapy.