Zipporah Nyangara
Executive Director, Haven of Dreams
Bold Question: What if adolescent girls and young women overcame intergenerational trauma to create wealth?
Pathway to Metis: Zipporah Nyangara is a multi-talented individual in different areas with over a decade of experience in community engagement at different levels. By profession, she is a psychologist. Through her experience and capacity building, accomplished facilitator. By calling, she is a mentor. She is passionate about mental health, specifically addressing intergenerational trauma. She is the founder and Executive Director of Haven of Dreams in Nakuru, working towards a society with improved mental health and emotional wellness.
Since its inception, Haven of Dreams has had two thematic areas; Mental Health and Psycho-Social Support; and Child, adolescent, and Youth Empowerment. The organization has reached 15,000 community members through direct services like individual and group therapies, community engagement, and advocacy. Our approaches to community engagement are play and art therapy, sports, and bibliotherapy. Through a program dubbed Okoa Kairetu, we have offered mental health and psycho-social support to teenage mothers through Group Therapy for 60 teenage mothers, family therapy for their caregivers and parents, and awareness creation on intergenerational trauma to 1,000 community members. Through this program, suicidal rates among teenage mothers have reduced, and they have acquired psychological resilience for quality of life. Teenage mothers have been able to return to school through the support of a CDF bursary.
She is an alumnus of different programs, including Place-Based Leadership Development, YALI, Kenya Leadership, and Accountability Lab, Academy for Women Entrepreneurs, African Civic Engagement Academy, Watson Base Camp, open-source Leader, and Advancing Equality Through Human Rights Education, Mental Health Accelerator, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Mentorship.
She is the psychosocial head of the County Action Plan for the Prevention and Countering Violent Extremism. She is also part of the Letters To Strangers Movement as the operations lead for the Kenya Chapter. The initiative focuses on using letters to enhance mental health and awareness.
She writes articles on mental health on her blog and was the first runner-up on the Africa Online Vocalist season 2 with Hellen Mtawali.
Zipporah desires to increase awareness of Mental Health in the community in the most straightforward form for community members to understand how intergenerational trauma affects us and help individuals acquire skills and resources to help them navigate different life partners. She hopes to partner with other organizations to create mental health awareness at the grassroots level and work with young children to break intergenerational trauma.
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