National Partnership for Community Training
Tools & ResourcesProviding a list of tools to utilize in all areas of education, training, reference, resource, and work with refugees.
Take 15 Tool
Share with your local screening clinic and any provider new to working with refugees!
Landscape Analysis
This Landscape Analysis tool may be utilized by your resettlement office and your community as you develop refugee mental health programming. By completing these questions, you can locate existing resources in your community related to the emotional health and well-being of refugees. We recommend completing this in a community stakeholder meeting and/or in a participatory process with community members. Responses to these questions can be a powerful tool to bring people together to share resources and determine avenues where people can begin to support (or share) the development of psychosocial services benefiting refugees. This Landscape Analysis tool was developed by the Pathways to Wellness project in partnership with the International Rescue Committee.
–Pathways to Wellness and International Rescue Committee
EcoMap
Suggestions for use: At your next staff meeting, provide this eco-map to staff. Ask staff to draw the type of relationship (see key on eco-map) they believe your agency has with each circle. Ask staff to answer questions and identify the themes that arise. NOTE: one circle is blank for your edit. Make this your own.
Ahmed Refugee Family Visual Tool
See our newest learning tool and the reasoning behind utilizing a family as a visual representative of a refugee family, The Ahmed Family.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Regional Administrators Map
Mental Health Screening Tools
The National Child Traumatic Stress Network produced a list of various tools utilized with various refugee groups.
Interpretation
Utah’s Department of Health produced an analysis of refugee mental health interpretation within the state.
Community Training Toolkit
NPCT’s Community Training Toolkit advances promising practices in the torture treatment field.
Training Curriculum & Bibliography
The National Child Traumatic Stress Network produced a list of various tools utilized with various refugee groups. Furthermore, this serves as an extensive bibliography for further reading on refugee mental health practice.
- Healing Invisible Wounds: Helping our Patients Find Hope & Recovery in a Violent World
- Health Promotion for Torture and Trauma Survivors
- Making Effective Service Referrals
- Multicultural Issues in Service Provision
- Secondary Trauma and the Refugee Population: Strategies for Self-care
- Stress Reduction Techniques
- Substance Abuse and the Torture Survivor Experience
- The Orientation Group
- The Use of Screening Instruments: A Door-opener for Empathy and Self-care
- Torture Overview and the Refugee Experience
- Trauma: From Surviving to Thriving: The Survivors’ Experiences and Service Providers’ Roles
- Traumatized Refugee Children and Families: Principles of Care
- Working Clinically with Traumatized Refugee Children and Families
- Working with Interpreters
- Interpreting for Refugee Services: Resources and References
National Symposium PowerPoint Presentations & Resources
The National Partnership for Community Training hosts a national symposium every three years to bring together national torture treatment experts, leaders, policy analysts, and social service providers to address national and regional issues within the torture and refugee trauma field. In April, 2015, NPCT in collaboration with the University of Miami School of Law’s Human Rights Clinic presented Connecting Leaders, Impacting Communities & Sustaining Programs: Strengthening the National Torture Treatment Network to 149 participants in 30 states with key note address by Mawi Asgedom and Daniel Trust.
- Creating Refugee Wellness Programs in Ohio and North Carolina
- UNC Global Transmigration Refugee Mental Health & Wellness Initiative
- Steps For Engaging Communities in Refugee Health_Mental Health Advocacy
- Designing and Evaluating Trauma-Informed Programming to Improve Outcomes for Refugee Women in the U.S.
- Faith Leaders as Strategic Partners
- Improving Outcome Study Design: Association of Psychosocial Factors Associated with Recovery of Survivors of Torture
- Integrated Holistic Approach to Medical and Mental Health Care The New H5 Model
- Legal Practitioners’ Perspective on Effective and Ethical Representation of Torture Survivors, Asylum Seekers, and Refugees
- New Frameworks to Build and Sustain Programs
- Psychological Issues and Techniques in Navigating the Asylum Process
- Refugee Mental Health Program Challenges
- The Role of Policy and Advocacy in Refugee, Immigration, and Torture Treatment Services
- Strategic Partnerships and Fundraising Techniques
- Training the Next Generation of Refugee Service Providers
- Working with Interpreters in Refugee Services
Videos
Stories of Hope from Bhutanese Refugees: Moving from Distress to Wellness
Mental Health Resources
Torture Survivors — Five-Part Video Series
There are many different ways in which programs deliver quality services to torture survivors. Watch members of the National Partnership for Community Training discuss their work with survivors of torture at the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, the NYU/Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture, and the Florida Center for Survivors of Torture.
This five-part series includes leaders in the field discussing the lessons learned and the models of care at some of the leading torture rehabilitation centers in the country.
Click on the links below:
Part 1: Who are torture survivors?
Part 2: What challenges do torture survivors face?
Part 3: Advice from practitioners?
Part 4: What is the trauma story?
Part 5: What can you do?
Refugee Trauma Treatment: A Literature Review

The Florida Center for Survivors of Torture’s national technical assistance program, the National Partnership for Community Training, wrote and edited a 7-chapter paper on Best, Promising, and Emerging Practices in the torture and refugee trauma treatment field. The work, “Best, Promising, and Emerging Practices: A Compendium for providers working with survivors of torture” was published as a thematic issue of the Torture journal.
Each chapter focuses on a particular domain of services – Medical, Psychiatric, Psychological, Expressive Arts, Social Services, Legal and Spiritual – to help both clinical and mainstream refugee service agencies provide services that have been identified as effective based on research.
Our goal with this project is to help advance the field of torture treatment and refugee trauma.
The 7-chapter article is available online here, or it can be ordered in hard copy format as well.
Group Treatment for Survivors of Torture and Severe Violence: A Literature Review
Suggested Readings, Films, and Articles
Click here to view a comprehensive (PDF) list of books, articles, and films suggested for those interested in learning more about refugee populations.
Articles
- Addressing the Need for Mental Health Screening of Newly Arrived Refugees: A Pilot Project
- Assessing War Trauma in Refugees: Properties of the Comprehensive Trauma Inventory-104
- Mental Health Screening Among Newly Arrived Refugees Seeking Routine Obstetric and Gynecologic Care
- The Range of Symptoms in Refugees of War
- The Refugee Health Screener-15 (RHS-15): Development and Validation of an Instrument for Anxiety, Depression, and PTSD in Refugees
- War Trauma and Torture Experiences Reported During Public Health Screening of Newly Resettled Karen Refugees: A Qualitative Study