Healing Streams

History

Healing Streams was founded in 2005 as a Canadian service agency with the vision to restore and refresh Christian leaders and their family members through seminars, retreats and professional counselling. However, this was soon to change. Within the first year of operation, a new direction began to emerge spurred on by an invitation from CSCODI, a Congolese community development organization, to equip church, community and government leaders with counselling skills to work with the war traumatized and raped in their communities. The first training seminar took place in November 2006. In 2007 a training manual was developed in response to requests from CSCODI and seminar participants. A second trip in 2008 saw over 150 training manuals distributed to participants.

In considering Healing Streams strategic direction for 2009, the board recognized that it was holding two balls, each of which were worthy and life giving but increasingly challenging to hold together. The board made the difficult decision to discontinue the provision of fee-for-service counselling in order to fully engage in the new strategic plan to become fully international in focus.. The following mission statement was adopted: Healing Streams responds to high needs and postwar environments by providing holistic, culturally-appropriate leadership and counsellor training in partnership with local organizations.

Our primary focus area is the Great Lakes region of Africa. This region includes the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. In Canada we train professionals interested in developing sensitivity and skills in working with post-war refugee populations and we build capacity within refugee groups to provide support for members of their communities who are suffering with post-war trauma.