Tutapona
About Company
Our History
In 2008, Carl and Julie Gaede, psychotherapists from Wisconsin, moved to Northern Uganda. With a passion to help people affected by the emotional impact of war find emotional healing from their experiences, Tutapona – a Swahili word meaning, ‘We will be healed’ – was born.
Uganda had suffered years of civil war and unrest at the hands of the Lord’s Resistance Army, leaving widows and orphans in its wake. The physical and emotional scars ran deep, but we held hope a that a community, once unified by pain, can become a community unified in healing through group-based mental health programming.
Today, Uganda is one of the top 3 refugee receiving nations in the world. We continue to work there in 4 locations around the country, to provide targeted, culturally relevant quality mental health support to some of the 1.4 million people registered as refugees.
In 2016, in response to the attempted genocide of the Yazidi people, the war on ISIS, and the Syrian refugee crisis, we set up our first Tutapona office in the Middle East in Duhok, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. These recent crises, combined with the slaughter of 50,000 Kurds in the eighties under the regime of Saddam Hussein, have caused significant damage to social structures and to individual mental health in the region.
Our group-based mental health programming has had notable success in several camps there, helping families and communities overcome barriers and experiences that have made them feel hopeless, bitter, and forgotten.
In September 2018, Tutapona launched our mental health program written specifically for children living as refugees. The Heroes Journey was written to help children work through their experiences using Post-Traumatic Growth strategies. Despite extraordinarily high adversity, with the right tools and access to safe places to process, those who have experienced significant challenges and events can not only develop resilience but have the potential to grow and live more fulfilled lives.
