“There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this time can have. Find it.” – adrienne maree brown
Healing Together, led by The Hub Collective Inc. in collaboration with MindTHRIVE Co., is a trauma-informed initiative building sustainable, culturally-grounded, and locally-led psychosocial programming across the Grenadines. Developed after Hurricane Beryl, this phase, funded by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI), addresses the overlapping impacts of climate crises, economic precarity, and historical marginalisation. Through workshops, one-on-one virtual and in-person therapy, somatic and nature-based healing, and a national awareness campaign, it strengthens community mental health systems and reduces stigma. Rooted in traditional wisdom and intergenerational learning, Healing Together fosters spaces where people process trauma, restore belonging, and reimagine collective resilience and recovery for small island communities.
Social Constructs and Conditions of Care
Care in the Caribbean has long been shaped by gender, class, and social norms. In the Grenadines, women carry much of the invisible weight of care, raising children, tending to the elderly, and holding families together in times of crisis, yet they often remain undervalued, overstretched, and under-supported. Men, meanwhile, shoulder unspoken emotional burdens and are expected to demonstrate strength, provision, and stoicism while lacking spaces to express vulnerability or grief.
Healing Together seeks to transform these realities by centring accessible, gender-responsive, and healing-centred mental health programming. Workshops are intentionally designed with transportation stipends, flexible hours, and meals to accommodate caregivers and reduce barriers to participation. Every session integrates trauma-informed practices, compassionate listening, and somatic exercises that invite participants to slow down and take stock; to breathe, move, and listen with presence.
Since the second phase of the project’s launch in September, 37 participants have taken part in Psychological First Aid (PFA) workshops and nature-based wellness gatherings across Union Island and Mayreau. These sessions teach how to recognise and respond to individuals in distress, active listening and compassionate communication, connecting to practical and social support, and effective self-care and peer support skills that ripple beyond the training space, into homes, classrooms, churches, and community circles. Care becomes not just an individual act but a shared practice. By making psychosocial education communal, the program is helping participants to redefine well-being as a social condition rooted in empathy and mutual accountability.
Colonial Remnants
The mental health landscape of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines still bears the imprint of colonial systems that once pathologised Black and Indigenous experiences while erasing traditional knowledge. Although significant progress has been made over the years, the strengthening of national infrastructure is still underway, and many essential services remain largely centralised, limiting consistent access for outer-island communities. The majority of services are provided on mainland St. Vincent through the Mental Health Rehabilitation Centre (MHRC) and several polyclinics offering varying levels of support, with Grenadine residents receiving only quarterly access to clinical services.
Healing Together challenges these inequities by localising care. Rather than importing rigid mental health models, the program collaborates with community knowledge holders, first responders, faith leaders, teachers, nurses and creative practitioners who hold generational wisdom about adaptation and recovery. The initiative weaves healing traditions, storytelling, care circles, creative arts, and ancestral foodways, using bush medicine, into modern psychosocial frameworks. These hybrid forms of care reconnect the emotional, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of healing, pushing back against colonial legacies that once separated body and mind from spirit and land. By bringing therapists and facilitators directly to the Grenadines, the project decentralises access and empowers local leaders as co-facilitators.
Breaking Down Stigmas
Nationally, mental health continues to carry stigma, silence, discrimination and fear. Many people, especially men and older generations, have internalised the idea that help-seeking is a sign of weakness. Healing Together is attempting to unravel these frozen and stuck ideologies by provoking intentional conversation within formal training settings and through strategies of deep listening, reinforcing PFA principles of Look, Listen and Link (Connect), all held by the power of community accountability.
In mid-September 2025, the project launched a national awareness campaign with its visual identity designed by Vincentian brand specialist Anusha Jiandani. The branding evokes softness, connectivity and belonging, hands cradling leaves, ocean currents embracing the sun, a whale tail sinking below the horizon. It is a reminder that healing is non-linear, cyclical, not a competition, and a collaborative process. This new visibility has created space for conversations that once lived in silos and behind family walls, allowing people to see care as a shared experience rather than something contained.
Alongside this, a national mental health column, featuring six Vincentian and diasporic-based mental health practitioners, will explore diverse perspectives on mental health, climate anxiety, grief, rebuilding self and confidence and aspects of adaptability. These articles, shared monthly through February 2026, hope to create an open forum for dialogue, bridging community knowledge with national policy aspirations.
Care as Collaboration
Healing Together’s gatherings demonstrate that recovery flourishes through connection and creativity. Its somatic and nature-based workshops invite participants to reconnect with the elements, memories, breath, imagination and storytelling. Through mindful walks, guided breathing, and storytelling circles, people come to understand the environment itself as a co-creator and a friend, one that listens without judgment while providing space for release, reflection, and renewal.
Seven mental health professionals now form the backbone of a referral network supporting one-on-one therapy for individuals who need such access. These partnerships form the scaffolding of a new country-wide mental health infrastructure built on trust rather than indifference. At the same time, on each island, local ambassadors assist in logistics and facilitation, while small businesses, community groups, schools, NGOs and elders contribute venues, food, intellect and time. Every visit becomes a collaborative act across age, gender, and vocation, an evolving ecosystem of care.
Hopes, Vision, and Long-Term Sustainability
The Hub Collective envisions Healing Together as more than a program; it is a movement toward radical care, climate resilience, and national renewal. The long-term goal is to establish a sovereign space for care, creativity, and rehabilitation in Bequia that anchors psychosocial programming, youth training, and ecological stewardship under one roof. The vision extends beyond this CFLI-funded phase. By linking mental health, environment, and culture/creativity, the Grenadines are preparing to face the next hurricane or crisis not only with stronger infrastructure but with reinforced networks, practical strategies and nimbleness.
Healing Together stands as a blueprint for small-island recovery, fusing cultural identity with psychosocial care. It shows that when communities are trusted to define their own healing, they create models of resilience that last far beyond any grant cycle or thematic. The work continues, with every story and shared cup of cocoa tea, toward a future where care is not a luxury but a collective part of our birthright.
A National Dialogue Begins
This article marks the first of six editorials that form a part of Healing Together: Reflections on Recovery and Adaptation, which will explore and expand the conversation on mental health and wellness across Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. From now through February 2026, we will share stories and analyses that examine national development and the role mental health plays in shaping a more compassionate, resilient country. We will explore the challenges and opportunities in our social landscape, how stigma still operates, and the seemingly Sisyphean task of rebuilding systems of care. Across the series, readers will hear from psychologists, social workers, counsellors, and leaders within the Ministry of Health, Wellness and the Environment, each contributing their insight into a growing national action plan for mental health advocacy in 2025 and beyond.
Healing Together is proud to be part of this collective journey, adding our voice, resources, and community partnerships to the national solution. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks.
Healing Together is supported by the Government of Canada through the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI).
