The Gap Is Too Big to Ignore.
After disaster, communities get emergency aid and crisis counseling. But long-term healing? That takes years—and the support system often ends in weeks. We're one part of a much bigger solution.
See Our ApproachThe Long Tail of Recovery.
In the immediate aftermath of disaster, communities receive emergency response: search and rescue, medical care, shelter, food. Clinical mental health services deploy for those with acute symptoms. Neighbors show up for neighbors. But what happens when the news cycle moves on and the isolation sets in?
The truth is, many organizations and individuals are working on this problem—and the need still outpaces the response. Most survivors experience distress that doesn't meet clinical thresholds but still disrupts their lives. They don't need a diagnosis. They need a place to belong, a way to process, and a reminder that they're not alone.
Isolation Compounds Harm
Research shows survivors who remain socially isolated experience lasting distress at far higher rates than those who maintain community connections. Yet most interventions focus on individual treatment, not rebuilding the web of relationships that holds people together.
Powerlessness Lingers
Disasters strip people of control over their lives, safety, and environment. That powerlessness doesn't automatically lift when the immediate danger passes—it often deepens. Healing requires opportunities to make choices and take action again.
Some Things Are Hard to Say
Trauma lives in the body, not just the mind. For many survivors, words feel impossible or inadequate. Creating something with your hands—making marks, mixing colors—opens pathways that talking alone can't reach.
We work in the space between emergency response and long-term clinical care—offering accessible, community-based gatherings where survivors can show up as they are, create alongside others who understand, and send messages of care to communities walking the same road.
Our Theory of Change.
Healing after crisis isn't just about treating symptoms. It's about restoring what disaster disrupts: connection, agency, meaning, and the body's natural capacity to find its way back to safety.
If → Then → Therefore
This isn't about credentials—it's about connection. Our gatherings can be facilitated by licensed art therapists, trauma-informed counselors, or trained community members. Because healing spaces shouldn't depend on resources that many communities don't have access to.
Go Deeper: The Research Behind the Framework
Our Holding Space Framework White Paper includes full citations from peer-reviewed research in polyvagal theory, disaster psychology, and post-traumatic growth—plus detailed methodology and program applications.
Designed for funders, researchers, clinicians, and partners who want the full picture.
The Holding Space Framework.
Our work is grounded in The Holding Space Framework—a trauma-informed approach that uses art-based gatherings to address what survivors actually need: a way back into their bodies, a room full of people who get it, the power to make choices again, and something meaningful to do with what they've been through.
At its core is The FRAME Method—Finding Resilience After Major Events—built on four pathways that work together. Each one is grounded in neuroscience and psychology. Each one feels like sitting down to paint with people who understand.
PRESENCE
The Body Frame
Coming home to your hands, your breath, this moment. When you pick up a brush and start making marks, something shifts.
Trauma can leave people feeling disconnected from their own bodies. The sensorimotor act of art-making—holding a brush, mixing colors, feeling paint on canvas—engages both hemispheres of the brain and helps integrate memories that feel fragmented or overwhelming.
Creating activates the part of the nervous system associated with safety and social connection. Research shows that even brief art-making sessions reduce cortisol and help the body remember how to regulate itself. No words required.
In Practice: Survivors sit down, pick up a brush, and start. The materials are simple. The invitation is open. And something in the body begins to settle.
Grounding Through Creation
Hands on canvas. Breath slowing. The body finding its way back to the present moment.
Side-by-Side Connection
Not facing each other across a table. Shoulder to shoulder, painting together. That's where healing happens.
PROXIMITY
The Circle Frame
Being in the room with people who understand—without having to explain. That's what breaks isolation.
After collective trauma, people often withdraw right when connection matters most. Research shows that perceived social support is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone moves toward growth or gets stuck in distress.
Our gatherings create what researchers call "side-by-side" connection—painting alongside others without the pressure of eye contact or disclosure. Mirror neurons fire. Nervous systems co-regulate. People remember they're not the only ones carrying this.
In Practice: Survivors gather in a familiar space—a community center, a school, a church basement—and create together. The room holds them. They hold each other.
POWER
The Choice Frame
Disaster takes away your choices. Healing gives them back—one small decision at a time.
Powerlessness is at the heart of trauma. Research shows that active coping—taking deliberate action rather than passively receiving services—predicts significantly better long-term outcomes. Even small acts of self-determination buffer against the helplessness that keeps people stuck.
Everything in our gatherings is an invitation, not a requirement. Show up or don't. Paint or just watch. Share your story or keep it to yourself. Choose what colors to use, what message to write, where your frame goes. Every choice says: You have power here.
In Practice: No one is told what to create. No one is pressured to share. The whole experience is built around honoring each person's agency—including the choice to simply be present.
Reclaiming Control
You decide. What to make. What to say. Whether to stay. Every choice is yours.
Survivor to Survivor
A frame travels from one community to another. A message from someone who's been there to someone who's there now.
PURPOSE
The Chain Frame
What happened to you was terrible. It shouldn't have happened. But you get to decide what you do with it now.
Viktor Frankl's work—born from surviving the Holocaust—established that the search for meaning is central to resilience. Contemporary research confirms that altruistic behavior after trauma predicts lower rates of PTSD and depression. When survivors help others, something shifts.
This isn't about finding a silver lining or pretending the pain was "worth it." It's about survivors choosing—if and when they're ready—to transform their experience into something they can offer someone else. A tornado survivor in Kentucky paints a message for flood survivors in Appalachia. Both communities are changed. This is peer support in its purest form: survivor to survivor, across geography and time.
In Practice: Every frame is a message to another community facing crisis. Survivors become the helpers. The chain of care grows. And no one walks alone.
The Chain of Care
Every Holding Frame is both an act of personal healing and a gift to someone else. That's what makes this different—it's not a service delivered to survivors. It's survivors holding space for each other.
A Survivor Creates
Someone who has lived through disaster sits down with a canvas and paint. They make something. Maybe it's hopeful. Maybe it's raw. Maybe it's just colors and texture. Whatever it is, it's theirs—and making it settles something in the body that words can't reach.
A Community Gathers
They're not alone. Around them, neighbors, strangers, and friends are doing the same thing—painting side by side, not talking about the trauma (unless they want to), just being together. The isolation that creeps in after crisis starts to crack.
A Frame Travels
The finished frame doesn't stay on a wall. It travels to another community facing crisis—wildfire survivors, school shooting families, hurricane-impacted towns. A message from someone who's been there to someone who's there now. You are not alone. We see you. Keep going.
The Chain Grows
Recipients become creators. They make frames for the next community in crisis. And the next. What started as one person's act of healing becomes a network of mutual support spanning towns, states, countries. This is how community resilience actually works.
What a Gathering Looks Like
The Holding Space Framework comes to life through Holding Frames gatherings—pop-up art spaces where survivors create together and send messages of care to other communities walking the same road.
We Partner Locally
We work with trusted community organizations—schools, faith communities, nonprofits, municipal agencies—to understand what this community needs, when they're ready, and how to create a gathering that fits their culture and capacity. Nothing is one-size-fits-all.
We Hold the Space
Gatherings last 1–4 hours in familiar, comfortable spaces. Mental health professionals are present. All volunteers are trained in Psychological First Aid. There are clear exit strategies, optional participation, and radical choice at every step. Come late. Leave early. Watch from the corner. It's all welcome.
Frames Find Their People
Completed frames travel to other communities facing crisis. Survivors become message-senders. Recipients see themselves reflected in words from people who understand. And the network of mutual support grows—community to community, survivor to survivor.
We're not first responders. We show up when the acute phase has passed and the long work of recovery begins—Month 6, Month 12, Year 5. We work with survivors 5 days or 5 years out. Healing doesn't follow a timeline, and neither do we.
Grounded in Research. Built for Real Life.
The Holding Space Framework synthesizes decades of peer-reviewed research in neuroscience, trauma psychology, and community resilience—and translates it into something that actually works in a church basement or a school gym. Here's what the evidence shows:
Art-Making Supports Recovery
- Even brief art sessions measurably reduce cortisol (the stress hormone)
- Creating with your hands engages both brain hemispheres, supporting integration of fragmented memories
- Non-verbal processing often reaches places that talk therapy can't—especially in acute phases
- Making something provides a sense of mastery when everything else feels out of control
Connection Is Protective
- Perceived social support predicts post-traumatic growth more strongly than trauma severity
- Social isolation dramatically increases long-term distress
- Community-based interventions show better outcomes than individual treatment alone
- Collective meaning-making strengthens community identity and cohesion
Agency Predicts Outcomes
- Active coping—taking deliberate action—leads to faster return to baseline functioning
- Restoring a sense of control buffers against the helplessness that underlies trauma
- Self-determined behavior reduces rumination and avoidance
- Choice-based interventions improve engagement and follow-through
Helping Others Helps You
- Altruistic behavior after trauma predicts lower rates of PTSD and depression
- The "helper's high" activates neurochemical rewards that reduce stress
- Becoming a helper interrupts victim identity and restores self-worth
- Meaning-making is central to resilience—and helping others creates meaning
This isn't theory applied from a distance. It's established science translated into community practice. Accessible. Scalable. And designed for the real conditions of disaster recovery—where resources are limited, people are exhausted, and clinical expertise isn't always available.
Join the Chain of Care
The need is massive. The framework works. What's missing is sustained support to bring this approach wherever communities are ready for it.
For Donors
Your monthly gift means we can say "yes" when a community reaches out—not "let us see if we can fundraise first."
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