The Witness to Witness Program (W2W), based on Weingarten’s witnessing model, began in July 2018 and originally was established to support health care workers and attorneys who were experiencing empathic distress working with people involved in various stages of the immigration detention process. In this webinar we will describe how W2W evolved to respond to the needs of the communities served both before and after the coronavirus pandemic. The form and content of programming needed to meet the criteria that they be both clinically sound and socially just. The intention is for people to leave our sessions – whether individual, group or webinar – feeling more aware and empowered so they can thrive while doing good work. Kaethe will discuss programming for attorneys working in the immigration sector, providers working in a prison settings, community health workers based in the 50 Mexican Consulates in the US, and health care clinicians and community health care providers working with populations made vulnerable by specific policies. We will discuss changes to the curriculum necessitated by the pandemic, responding to the prevailing mood of the clinicians and managers that we serve. W2W creates virtual communities of support as a way of strengthening individual and organizational resilience and as a way of doing reasonable hope together. In this workshop, people will share their ways of doing socially just clinical work, whether with individuals, families, groups or in the community. We will collaborate to imagine ways that clinical practice can be a form of social activism using the practices of W2W’s work as a foundation for the discussion and applying broadly to participants own needs and settings.The core of the training focuses on understanding the impact of witnessing on providers. We identify four witness positions and their differential impact on clients, clinicians who serve them and the community at large. Each position has implications for a multitude of interlinked relationships. A number of other terms are introduced and distinctions made among them, for instance the difference between moral injury for health care providers and PTSD.

Hosted by Therapy Training Boston online for 4 CEs. For more info, visit the event webpage.