The Community Collaboratory @ PsiAN

Project Incubator for Clinicians Working in Community Settings

The Community Collaboratory @ PsiAN is a project incubator and consultation group for depth-oriented mental health practitioners who want to apply a relational, psychodynamic framework to working in community-based programs focused on clinical, educational, community development, and social justice goals.

In community settings, depth-oriented clinicians function simultaneously as citizens, collaborators, and consultants. Furthermore, the work we do is often interdisciplinary, characterized by an approach to groups and communities in which personal and cultural histories, the unconscious, and the socio-political surround are always at play.

The objectives of the Community Collaboratory @ PsiAN are to:

  • Bring psychotherapists, educators, and other practitioners into creative conversation on compelling and persistent problems in the communities in which they live and work;

  • Provide perspective and skills for the challenges of working in interdisciplinary teams;

  • Identify a set of resources and curricula reflecting new scholarship, reports from the field, and tool-kits for practice.

The Community Collaboratory @ PsiAN is a lively, supportive, and generative learning community with participants from all over the United States. Guided by facilitators, Jane Hassinger and Billie Pivnick, participants think together about the creation of innovative projects characterized by mutuality, reciprocity, and transformative learning.

In the 12 - 14 week group, participants share dilemmas and challenges in practice including adopting new professional roles, working in interdisciplinary teams, understanding and navigating team processes, and responding effectively to phases of project development in target communities. Facilitators offer case studies and relevant scholarship, as well as provide supervision for implementation of projects.

 

Completed Projects

  • Support groups, for wide range of audiences and settings

    • immigrants; NICU workers at large urban hospital; university students facing deportation, youth on the autism spectrum, houseless individuals

  • Mental health interventions

    • LGBTQ+ youth in Haiti focusing on race, gender and social inequalities; survivors of the Parkland school shooting; walk-in mental health assistance for impoverished Indian community centers; interdisciplinary teams serving asylum seekers and dealing with vicarious traumatization

  • Clinically-oriented projects

    • research and plan to facilitate groups on race and racism in the clinical encounter; development of community track at psychoanalytic institute; organization of anti-racism resources to address institutional racism in a psychoanalytic institute

  • Art therapy and art-making

    • documentary film featuring Vamik Volkan's work on international peace-making; exhibition addressing intergenerational trauma with Indigenous Elders in Australia; theater projects based on narrratives of survivors from Holocaust and other genocides; program for a foster care organization integrating DBT principles with creative arts

  • Resources in communities:

    • proposal to fund community projects with Indigenous communities; vision for a girls' school in Northern India; needs assessment with K-12 educators, students and mental health professionals around violence prevention

Publications

Interested in joining PsiAN?