What can we do about the trauma experienced by those who have lived through Bushfires?

Early interventions for disasters and building capacity for communities to build their recovery

As members and leaders in their communities, Rotarians are ideally placed to bring hope and healing to people in their area after a manmade or natural disaster.

Rotary Clubs can empower their community in collaboration with local agencies by sponsoring training to teach mental health workers how to treat trauma and develop stabilisation programs for lay people to assist others. The advantages of education for the community are;

·      Teaching mental health professionals EMDR therapy (recommended by WHO* for PTSD) provides them with ability to treat the emotional effects of trauma in an efficient and effective manner; *(World Health Organisation 2013)

·      As familiar and trusted members of their community, these professionals have an immediate rapport with their victims; and

·      They have a skill they can continue to use for the rest of their career to help build resilience in others; a skill that will still be available in their community the next time disaster strikes. A skill they can use with a variety of traumatic situations: assaults, family violence, accidents, medical trauma and people with defence or emergency service traumas. 

As EMDR therapy does not require people to describe the memory in detail, it facilitates effective treatment where people are reticent about personal disclosure and protects the therapists from vicarious traumatisation. Used internationally in disasters since 1995, EMDR trauma recovery programs have developed effective treatments for all stages of community recovery.

 There are specific early intervention protocols which can be used to prevent the development of PTSD. There are group protocols which can be delivered on location and to children.

How does our program operate?

Healing the Hurt

The program Healing the Hurt, a Rotary-enabled worldwide project, supports the delivery of trauma relief training worldwide.

We facilitate training with internationally recognised and accredited EMDR therapy trainers. There are over 70 countries with EMDR Associations and trainers available on most continents. Local Rotary clubs can sponsor local training or provide scholarship support for people to attend trainings,

The training is a minimum of 50 hours and delivered in two to three parts over a few months depending on the organisation providing the training. The training fees are negotiated according to circumstances as a humanitarian project and below commercial rates.

This is not a fly-in, fly-out ‘event’ but a program which creates a lasting capacity within a community to treat their own on an ongoing basis.

This activity can be delivered in disaster-prone areas either in the aftermath of a disaster, during the three to six months following (before traumatic memories are consolidated into PTSD) or as a preventative and capacity-building project. This is very suitable in places which suffer disasters cyclically - eg cyclones and bushfires. The program helps emergency workers and whole communities who have been exposed to traumatic events.

We can arrange training of expert therapists as well as allied health professionals, who are best placed to provide group therapies in the immediate aftermath.

A Rotary Club’s part of each project is to recruit the local therapists and allied health workers to be trained (we have materials and a process for this), then to arrange a training venue and refreshments for the sessions, and to pay for the travel and accommodation for the trainer (of course home-hosting is ideal if possible). Our panel of trainers teach free or at a reduced cost in delivering this training, which is normally very expensive and out of the reach of most organisations and their therapists.

Once trained, and with appropriate follow-up (which is scheduled into the projects), a therapist can treat many thousands of Trauma Survivors over the rest of their working career, at great benefit to the individuals treated, and to the community as a whole.

This treatment has been shown to be effective for first responders who attend disaster situations.

Another focus of Healing the Hurt is to help people who have been exposed to family violence, adults and children. The effects of family violence can be long term and increase the rate of physical, as well as psychological, problems in later life. By assisting families as early as possible, treatment can help people return to normal lives.

Research shows that a proportion of Trauma Survivors will become violent in their families as they suffer emotional  pain and frustration, thus beginning a cycle of abuse in a family context. So for the RAGFamSafe, this is a Prevention Strategy as well as a treatment project.

The program can be implemented as either a Community Service project in your own local area, or as an International Service project for implementation in other countries - especially those which are prone to natural disasters or have suffered internal conflict or war. We plan to arrange for delivery in Refugee Camps and after one-off Disasters as well, and these projects will need sponsorship by an overseas Club. in order to access the Rotary International Global Grant system.

You may also DONATE to this work via the button at the top of this page.. We have no paid staff, so all funds go to the Program.

*Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing . See this short video and the one below for an inspiring explanation of how this WHO - endorsed therapy treats Trauma Survivors. More information, FAQs and links for this evidence-based, WHO-approved therapy can be found here. (still under development and subject to change)

To learn more about how you, your Club or your organisation can be a part of a Healing the Hurt project, please contact us using this form:

Breaking the Family Violence Cycle

is our principal objective, and Healing the Hurt is one program that can help in achieving this interruption, by reducing the number of traumatised individuals in our society through making the relevant training more widely available to therapists.

We have another program in preparation to help young people become more resilient in the face of abuse or witnessing abuse in their families. We will share more when this becomes available  for general application.

If you have a Rotary program to share that aligns with our objectives, please let us know by means of this form.