His approach

A community-based model of psychosocial capacity development.

The premise

Humanitarian mental health responses often rely on specialists who leave when funding or deployment ends. Majd built his practice on a different premise: lasting recovery depends on a qualified workforce from the affected community, able to sustain care through recovery and to respond to the next emergency.

Across every place he worked, his model rested on four components.

The model

  1. Selecting local practitioners

    In each affected population, Majd identified people with professional backgrounds in psychiatry, psychology, social work, sociology, education and child development. Recruiting from within the community brought language, cultural understanding and the trust of the people being served.

  2. Structured training

    Practitioners were trained in the HeartMath Institute’s self-regulation model, which uses heart rhythm techniques to reduce stress and strengthen emotional regulation, together with Majd’s own group-based approach to recovery from trauma without medication. Training covered education on stress and trauma, self-regulation skills, group facilitation and needs assessment.

  3. Sustained supervision

    Training began the relationship. Majd continued to supervise, consult and mentor the practitioners he trained as they moved into independent practice. In 2015 and 2016 he was still in active contact with practitioners he had trained in Kosovo and Indonesia.

  4. Long-term engagement

    Majd became part of the communities he served and remained a member of their professional networks, which built trust, encouraged people to use the services and kept ownership local.

What it left behind

The model produced a trained, supervised and locally owned workforce, care that continued after the outside response ended, and people already in place for future crises.

Its principles, sharing tasks with local professionals and building on community resources, are consistent with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings (2007). The foundation’s own programs follow the same model.

About the foundation