IPAMO House of Healing: Multilingual Counselling and Interpreting Service Supporting Women

IPAMO House of Healing: Multilingual Counselling and Interpreting Service Supporting Women and Girls Who Have Experienced Gendered Violence

Background Information

What is IPAMO?

IPAMO House of Healing was a pioneering project established in 2012 to providewomen from Refugee communities an opportunity to enter into a specialist programme of training and development and gain an accredited para counselling support qualification. The aim was to enhance participants’ employment opportunities and capacity build Refugee communities by individually and collectively validating the experiences, resilience skills and knowledge of the trainees and equip them to work with other Refugee women’s lived experience of gendered violence.

IPAMO was successful in enabling participants to provide specialist para counselling support services to women in their mother tonguesupporting their journey towards recovery from violence. This project has been extremely rewarding to both trainees and clients from Refugee communities, some of whom are the most vulnerable in our society. A total of 38 women graduatedfrom the course, speaking 42 languages between themand many of the participants have now gone onto further education or have secured employment in external organisations as well as within WGN’s own services.

Quote from trainee:

‘This opportunity has really helped me personally to be able to share my experiences, which has in turn helped me to help my clients share theirs. I do not feel broken anymore, I am so proud of myself for what I have achieved from this course, I have already applied to go on and do more counselling…’

Launch of the new and improved IPAMO Project 2017-18

Women and Girls Network arenow expanding the work of its IPAMO Project by launching a new training and development programme that provides opportunities to bi and multilingual women to gain an accredited qualification in para counselling support, as well as further developing their skills inadvocacy and interpreting.

Traineeswho will be invited from a broad range of backgrounds and differing experience will be supported through a programme of training, self development, and supervision. They will provide specialist culturally and linguistically sensitive services to Black and Minority Ethnic (BME)and Refugeewomensurviving experiences of gender based violencein their mother tongue, supporting clients recovery from trauma and their transition into life in the UK. Trainees will be supported via WGN to deliver these services within London Rape Crisis Centres and organisations in the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector.

Thiswill extend reach and accessibility, benefiting women across London from a variety of diverse backgrounds. We anticipate that the range of languages that these services will be available in could include;African,Arabic, Asian, Chinese,Eastern European, Iranian and Spanish amongst other languages.

At the heart of this unique project is the provision of high quality and appropriate therapeuticpara counselling, interpreting and advocacy services for women, supporting and empowering them to them to recover from the devastating impact of violence and resultant trauma sequela.

Quote from a client:

‘We do not have counselling in my country, we should have this, and many of my family and my sister in my community need counselling. I cannot put into words how this has helped me. It has saved me.’

Training with Women and Girls Network

Women and Girls Network (WGN) has been providing specialist services for 30 years to women and girls who have experienced violence, or who are at risk of violence.WGN is an approved centre for delivering accredited training and is providing the IPAMO training free of charge which greatly increases accessibility into this profession to a wide range of diverse individuals. WGN’s emphasis is on empowering women andthe benefits for the women participating in this programme include gaining an accredited qualification whilst developing their skills in the additional modalities of advocacy and interpreting, gaining valuable work experiencewith organisations within the VAWG sector,further supporting their potential career progression by creating new pathways for future employment.

What does the training involve?

Participants will be required to attend two levels of training–an introduction and an advanced course. The introduction course provides the opportunity to ensure trainees are sufficiently emotionally robust to embark on the programme and provides a basic orientation to basic counselling skills.

Introduction to Counselling and Support (5 training days)

Units to include:

Basic counselling skills
Approaches to Supporting Women who have Experienced Violence

Diversity and Inclusion in the Helping Profession

Following the successful completion of the introduction course,participants’will progress to the more in-depth advanced course. Practitioners will develop greater knowledge and skills working with the myriad of complex issues associated with surviving gendered violence in settings within the VAWG sector.

The course combines theoretical and experiential components focusing on issues faced byBlack and Minority Ethnic and Refugee survivors of gendered violence. Our training is rooted in the WGN gender responsive, trauma focused, holistic model of care delivered from a feminist perspective and embraces diversity and inclusivity. The training has been designed to be participatory, experiential, fluid and creative. The structure and course content provides a solid grounding in counselling, advocacy and interpreting theory and skills in relation to gendered violence.

Embedded into the structure of the programme are various mechanisms that will support participants’ learning needs, including clinical supervision to develop participants’ clinical practice and personal counselling. These elements provide an integral part of the learning and development ensuring emotional robustness and that participants’ own traumas are managed and a key element in ensuring participants are adequately supervised to support vulnerable women and girls.

Advanced Course (15 training days)

Units to include:

Counselling Knowledge for Effective clinical Practice
Counselling skills
Personal Development
Working Holistically- Integrating Empowerment and Multicultural perspectives
Interpreting skills
Advocacy
Self care

Please note that there may be some small changes to the course content.

For further information about the IPAMO Project please contact: Parveen Betab, Project Coordinator at Women and Girls Network, email: Tel: 020 3096 7712. Please note that the deadline for applications for trainees is midnight on Wednesday 17th May.

For more information about WGN please visit or follow us on twitter; @WomenandGirlsN