TRAUMA HEALING INSTITUTE
2024 IMPACT REPORT
January-December
Our Ministry
The Trauma Healing Institute exists to share the healing news of God’s love. We support churches, organizations and individuals with practical tools they can use to help people heal and flourish in their own communities.
In 153 nations across the globe, we empower the body of Christ with resources and programs that help people move from the loneliness of emotional suffering to the joy of loving connection. Our methods are grounded firmly in Scripture, designed to meet the rigorous standards of mental-health practice, and proven by decades of healing in some of the world’s most challenging environments.
This year, more than ever before, our work is driven by the knowledge that in every community around the world, people are hurting — and the Church is ill-equipped for the current emotional and spiritual crisis.
Right now, an estimated one billion people are suffering the effects of psychological trauma worldwide. Individuals, churches, and organizations need more effective tools to help people heal from trauma and build emotional resilience. It is our joy and honor to hear this call, partnering with organizations around the world to put resources in the hands of those who need them most and working to create a strong and vibrant culture of healing, in the Church and beyond.
Our Mission
To help the Church address the effects of trauma, grief and loss with resources that integrate biblical and mental health principles.
The power of healing in community
Our approach to trauma healing is uniquely effective, bringing together proven mental health practices with the wisdom of the Bible. What truly sets our method apart is that it works in community, by inviting people into a process of healing and resilience-building together with others and with God. In person or online, THI resources help people who are suffering discover that they are not alone.
This year’s progress
We published a long-awaited contextualization of our classic curriculum for military service members. Healing the Wounds of Military Trauma complements American Bible Society’s online resource, Never Alone, which adapts the core THI curriculum to meet the specific needs of members of the military in the U.S. and Canada.
We published the revised 2021 edition of our core program, Healing the Wounds of Trauma, in both African and European French. It is being published in Europe, Canada and West Africa.
We adapted Unstuck, our Bible-based guidebook for teenagers living through crisis, to meet the special needs of young people in the U.S. coping with violence in their community.
THI partner LifeFocus produced a television program called Leah Kida to help children cope with trauma. This Arabic-language show has aired on SAT7Kids and been distributed on YouTube and Facebook Plus to 21 Arab countries. Other media networks throughout the Middle East are now picking up the program as well.
As we expand our focus beyond psychological trauma to the whole spectrum of emotional distress, we’ve created a new video called “The Journey of Healing,” which explains in simple terms how people move from suffering to resilience together with God and each other. This new video joins two others, “What is Trauma?” and “Healing from Trauma,” the English versions of which have been viewed 57,000 times on YouTube alone. All three videos are now being translated into Levantine Arabic.
We launched a new partnership with Compassion International to develop an audio healing group curriculum for youth. And our new partnership with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference will reach 5,000 Latino churches in America as part of a mental health initiative they are championing.
In two independent studies, just published in Spirituality in Clinical Practice, researchers validated a new scientific survey instrument to assess the efficacy of THI ministries and tested the efficacy of healing groups in a randomized controlled trial involving 200 participants in Nigeria. Their conclusion: THI’s program is “effective in reducing trauma symptoms and improving coping and engagement with God, the Bible and the church.”
Healing happens in a group
“I love trauma healing because it happens in a group. It creates community for people. And it’s the most powerful way that I’ve seen for people to begin to share their stories, recognize how trauma has affected them, and … to bring it out to a group in a safe way where they can start to get healing.”
Jay Baylor, Pastor/Director of Love Baltimore
“
Testimonies
Pastor Jaime Rene Fiallos (Ecuador)
Healing by the Numbers
Small group programs
THI’s ministry began with in-person healing groups — small groups of people, led by trained peer facilitators using the Healing the Wounds of Trauma curriculum, who journey from suffering to hope in community. Today, people can participate in healing groups both in-person and virtually, with an expanded list of offerings for specific audiences like children, youth, incarcerated people, and refugees.
Healing groups
In 2024, 24,778 people have participated in healing groups, including 1,803 children and teenagers. As we prioritize caring for hurting young people worldwide, healing groups will serve many more youth in the years ahead.
84 countries had active trauma healing ministries — including in Greece, Samoa, and Slovakia for the very first time.
Audio healing groups
To make healing groups much more accessible to many more people, THI developed an app-based audio version of the curriculum, with a video-based training for group facilitators. Piloting wrapped up in June and the team is making updates to the program based on user feedback. We expect to launch the updated program in early 2025. Of the 135 countries where people are using the app, it is most popular in the United States, Ghana, Ecuador, Kenya, and Nigeria.
The app was downloaded to 3,408 mobile devices, twice as often on Android devices as on Apple ones. And 1,393 new facilitators were trained to lead healing groups with the audio program. In the countries where facilitators have already started leading healing groups using the app, 1,661 people have completed healing groups — including 645 in Guatemala alone.
Audio healing group app use by country
The app is available in ten languages so far:
English
Spanish
French
Swahili
the Twi language of Ghana
the Philippines’ Cebuano
the Hausa language of central Africa
Liberian Kolokwa English
West African Pidgin English from Cameroon, and
Mooré from Burkina Faso.
Healing group facilitators
This year, we’ve continued to improve the support we offer to the growing global community of trained healing group facilitators by making the resources to train new facilitators and lead groups more accessible. We created a new email journey for audio healing group leaders to guide them all the way from creating an account through training to reporting the statistics from the healing groups they lead. With the support of THI partners around the world, 5,194 newly trained peer facilitators have joined the Global Community of Practice and are ready to lead healing groups on their own.
Print and digital resources
Crisis response tools
From Hurricane Helene to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, this year has been marked by crises around the world — one reason THI has distributed 38,061 crisis-response materials. These resources help people who have experienced disasters cope in the immediate aftermath of a devastating event.
This past September, when Hurricane Helene inundated western North Carolina with unprecedented floods, our partners at Water Mission sprang into action to help God’s children there. Along with desperately needed clean water infrastructure, their disaster response team also provided 10,827 of THI’s Beyond Disaster materials — with more to come — and helped community leaders learn how to lead small groups with survivors using it.
Partner Spotlight
Water Mission
“We had our first Beyond Disaster training yesterday at First Presbyterian Church with 19 attendees. A total of eight different churches or businesses or ministries were represented. I have already gotten a few emails from yesterday’s attendees sharing with me that they are going to recommend other churches and organizations to contact me to set up more trainings.”
Joey Garner, Living Water Director, Water Mission
“
Standalone resources
Our Bible-based standalone resources — convenient, free, and shareable — provide pathways for people and communities to find help in a time of need or to go deeper in their healing journeys at their own pace.
Restoring Hope Resources
Restoring Hope Resources are easy-to-use resources that help people deal with common life challenges like stress, anxiety, grief, disappointment and loss. In 2024 we released two exciting new resources: Reconnect, a tool to help navigate stress and overwhelming emotions that’s designed especially for young people (and their parents), and Forgiveness, a pamphlet that shares insights and practical actions that can help those who want to forgive and heal.
Trauma Healing Basics
Trauma Healing Basics are simple, practical tools that help people learn about trauma and start to heal. Our new 90-second video, “The Journey of Healing,” is the latest in our three-part video series on trauma and healing. Find all three videos on our YouTube channel or on our Trauma Healing Basics Resources page.
All these materials are available in both digital and print formats. This year, 103,310 resources helped churches and organizations meet the ongoing crisis of emotional suffering in their communities with sound mental health counsel and the healing wisdom of God’s Word.
Television and radio
Several multimedia programs, including the children’s Arabic language TV program Leah Kida, and Farsi language TV program of Healing the Wounds of Trauma, distributed by Mohabat TV, were widely broadcast throughout the Middle East. And trauma healing radio programs were broadcast in Fulfulde, West African Pidgin English, French, Tiv, and Nigerian English, reaching a total of 216,782 listeners.
Outreach
As more and more people around the world look to the internet for comfort when they’re struggling, THI has embraced the potential of digital outreach to spread the word about God’s healing love for all who suffer.
THI on the web
After a ground-up redesign of traumahealinginstitute.org, 41,945 people used our website in 2024. Collectively, these visitors interacted with the website 382,002 times — scrolling, clicking, watching a video, or downloading a resource an average of 9.1 times per visit.
In all, 63,000 people found our website in 2024, an 85% increase over the same period last year. The vast majority of them arrived there on their own initiative, not through our promotional efforts. Remarkably, 40% of visitors found us using search — a testament both to the deep need for Bible-based healing resources in our world, and to the uniqueness of our ministry in meeting it.
Beyond our main website, 18,508 facilitators logged in to the site we maintain to help them lead healing groups, and about 4,800 people actively used our standalone resources.
THI on social media
As the social media landscape changes, so does THI’s outreach. In the past year, we’ve begun posting a mix of Scripture, product updates, and links to free resources across social platforms. Our new strategy increased YouTube video views by 258% over the previous year, and more than doubled our Facebook reach.
Email journeys
Between February and June of this year, we launched a new way to connect with people who find and download THI’s healing resources: 12 customized email journeys, tailored to the meet needs that brought them to us. We sent 7,775 of these emails and saw 3,001 resource downloads.
The healing ahead
To help the Church address the effects of trauma, grief and loss with resources that integrate biblical and mental health principles.