FSOS grad student leads international initiative in Liberia

Zamzam Dini, a Family Social Science doctoral student specializing in Couple and Family Therapy, represented the Women’s Initiative for Self-Empowerment (WISE) in a partnership to facilitate capacity-building training and healthy relationships education to community service providers in Liberia this past summer.

The Liberian initiative was a collaboration between WISE and the Liberian-based non-governmental organization (NGO), Organization for Women Empowerment (OWE). Dini’s solo trip to conduct the Transformational Self-Empowerment Training in Liberia was funded by a grant called the Collaboration for Community Impact Grant facilitated by the Community Solutions Program (CSP) which is funded through the U.S. State Department.

Dini created and managed the Parent Encouragement Program that supports immigrant parents in navigating the K-12 school system and increasing their engagement. Some of the topics covered in the parent workshop were adverse childhood experiences (ACES) & trauma, social and emotional learning in children, attachment, and child development.

In addition, she led four healthy relationships workshops with 19 girls from three different groups and four NGOs to help them identify healthy/unhealthy traits in a relationship and how to intervene to ensure they feel safe in the relationships they create with family, friends, and partners. Topics include women’s empowerment, girl’s empowerment, healthy relationships and NGO infrastructure building (the last training was facilitated by WISE executive director Pamela Zeller via Zoom). 

Dini said the experience directly related to her research on understanding refugee trauma across generations.

“I value outreach and connecting to immigrant and refugee families directly which is what led me to work with WISE and our parents,” she says.

Dini, whose family emigrated to the U.S. as refugees of Somalia’s civil war when she was two years old, grew up in Seattle in a vibrant community of immigrants and refugees.  She understands deeply the challenges facing these communities.

“I grew up seeing trauma and pain, as well as resilience and strength in the communities around me and I knew I wanted to become a clinician from a young age,” she says. In college she majored in psychology as an undergraduate and discovered marriage/couple and family therapy while researching graduate programs.

“I felt it was the better match for me and my worldview,” she says. ”M/CFT has a systemic worldview and considers relational/contextual factors in understanding people that psychology simply does not do systematically.”

Currently Dini is a trauma therapist at the Minnesota Trauma Recovery Institute (MNTRI) where she works with individuals, couples, and families in treating chronic PTSD and trauma, as well as everyday life stressors. 

Her goal in her doctoral program is to help bridge the gap between academic research and immigrant and refugee communities. 

“Taking what we are learning in the classroom in our graduate programs and disseminating it to the community at large is a responsibility that we all have as researchers,” she adds.

Her next project for WISE will be to develop a new curriculum and facilitate parent workshops for new Afghan refugee arrivals in the next couple of months. She plans to incorporate the internship requirement in the program for this new project as well. 

More about WISE

WISE’s mission is to support immigrant and refugee women, girls and those on the feminine gender spectrum in their journey of self-actualization through culturally-responsive education, advocacy, systems change and resource development. WISE was created by a group of multicultural women in 1995. They came together to address the disparities in the treatment of immigrant women and those born in the U.S. in terms of educational opportunities, employment, and career advancement. Over time the organization has continued to expand its understanding of the dynamics which hold back immigrant and refugee women, girls and those on the feminine gender spectrum from achieving their full potential.