Green String Network

The Green String Network is a regional organization based in Kenya supporting healing-centered peacebuilding local organizations to develop and design trauma-informed programming across the region, including in Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Kenya. We use storytelling, watercolor illustrations, and embodied practices to help people articulate the traumas they have been through, and recognize how these experiences shape their behavior. Then we use these methods to unlock new ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling, so that they can live more full and peaceful lives as individuals and communities. This healing process is the first and fundamental step towards building peace, wellbeing, and prosperity in the long term. GSN fills the gap between peacebuilding, mental and emotional wellbeing (mental health), and development/governance utilizing a rich African storytelling tradition as well hundreds of watercolor paintings as a window to the long process of rekindling individual and communal healing and social reconciliation as a strategy of building resilience and breaking cycles of violence.