Professionally, I was serving as Project Coordinator for Embrace and its Mobile Mental Health Clinic (MMHC) during my experience with the Bridges to New Horizons program. The MMHC initiative is centered on a large bus that travels to various sites to provide individual assessments and referrals to mental healthcare and psychosocial support available through Primary Healthcare Centers. The purpose and availability of the MMHC is aligned with Lebanon's National Mental Health Program under the umbrella of Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health. Services have been supported by Stichting Vluchteling (SV) – The Netherlands Refugee Foundation, European Union (EU), and International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The MMHC  has a dedicated team of medical staff; a Field and Care Officer; Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) and Research Office; MMHC driver, and a growing pool of volunteer therapists-in-training. Communities in Lebanon from Akkar in the north to Tripoli to the Beqaa and the South have significant need for mental health services due to the effects of conflict, displacement, and instability. Physical and financial access to care is limited. 

I began the Bridges to New Horizons program with four years of experience at the MMHC, including being part of the organization's formation and launch. The experience elevated my thinking about the definition of leadership and the opportunities that Embrace and the MMHC have to strategically contribute to positive peace, resilience, and social cohesion. The use of the Spiral Dynamics framework reinforced the idea that identity is not singular in Lebanon; there are many diverse identities with different value systems that influence the extent to which people feel a sense of belonging and inclusion. I gained a greater sense of my natural leadership style and insights into how to move more successfully between other individual styles and community systems.

The new leadership insights, plus the emphasis on project management tools in Bridges to New Horizons and on trauma healing practices, prompted deep reflection for both me and Embrace leadership team members. Moving through Bridges to New Horizons steps over several months, we thought anew about the purpose of the MMHC, the places where we serve, and circumstances that could lead us to new ways of being of compassionate service. We mapped a Conflict Tree (root causes and effects of the problem), completed a Theory of Change (awareness of and access to mental health care leads to improved well-being, which in turn reduces social tensions and creates openings to build social cohesion), and laid out a project plan by using a LogFrame and Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) with output areas for awareness, service delivery, and referral pathways – each with its own indicators and measures.

Were there any big ideas about peace that emerged during the program? Most definitely. Through the Eight Pillars of Peace from the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) and other violence and peace frameworks used in the program, we saw more clearly our role in “positive peace” (increasing the presence of justice, trust, and functioning systems) and “negative peace” (reducing sources of personal and community conflict). Our strategic epiphanies include the value of adding a second MMHC, adding more visits to communities that have experienced the most direct conflict, and expanding cooperation with institutional stakeholders in Lebanon’s military and justice systems – directions that, to Embrace, qualify as potentially transformative.