Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN) is pleased to offer a virtual educational and support program for health care workers.  The four-session program focuses on tools to manage the stressors that arise at work and at home during challenging times. The sessions will present a model of the helper as a witness that provides concrete suggestions as to how the provider can shift from feeling ineffective to feeling effective and competent. The sessions are facilitated by an experienced clinician. The curriculum emphasizes ways to strengthen individual resilience to better face current and future personal and workplace challenges.  The curriculum addresses topics such as empathic distress, moral injury, grief, adaptive change, resilience, and hope.  We believe that hope is not just a feeling but something we do together!  Each session will include video materials followed by the application of the core concepts to personal and workplace situations in a highly interactive format.

Priority will be given to healthcare workers working at health centers. In an effort to enhance the learning experience, participation in this cohort will be limited to 10 participants.
 

Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., directs the Witness to Witness (W2W) Program for the Migrants Clinician Network. The goal of W2W is to help the helpers, primarily serving health care workers, attorneys and journalists working with vulnerable populations. She worked at Harvard Medical School (1981-2017) where she was an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology and at the Family Institute of Cambridge (1982-2009). She founded and directed the Program in Families, Trauma and Resilience at the Family Institute of Cambridge.  Internationally, she has taught in Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe and New Zealand, where she was a Fulbright Specialist.  Dr. Weingarten’s work focuses on the development and dissemination of a witnessing model.  One prong of the work is about the effects of witnessing violence and trauma in the context of domestic, inter-ethnic, racial, political, and other forms of conflict. The other prong of the witnessing work is in the context of healthcare, illness, and disability.  Her work on reasonable hope has been widely cited.

Heather Clifford, PsyD, started volunteering with the Witness to Witness program in 2019. She joined the program after feeling frustrated that there wasn’t more support in place for people helping vulnerable populations. As a psychologist, she is no stranger to feelings of burnout and empathic distress. She is excited to help facilitate the peer support group and provide information that has helped so many people, herself included, continue the work they feel passionate about while taking care of themselves. She currently lives in New York where she works with young adults in private practice and is an adjunct instructor at NYU.