The 2019 recipient for Kindling is the Healthcare Foundation of Northern Sonoma County. Healthcare Foundation works to create healthier communities by raising funds to invest in critical areas of healthcare needs. Their three main focus areas include early childhood development, access to healthcare and mental health.
In response to the overwhelming needs created in the aftermath of the destructive wildfires in 2017 a Wildfire Mental Health Collaborative was formed to offer free help to those recovering from the fire. The six components of the collaborative include the development of an informative website to learn techniques to cope with stress, an app to help build resilience especially for teens, free individual counseling, trauma informed yoga, private group sessions at your own location and drop-in group counseling.
The Kindling Foundation chose to fund the Skills for Psychological Recovery training offered by the Healthcare Foundation in July of 2019 to mental health professionals. This is an evidence-based intervention to learn how to provide post- natural disaster support to moderately-distressed fire survivors. Over 320 mental health professionals have already been trained in previous trainings. Healthcare Foundation has teamed up with researchers at Stanford who will measure the effectiveness of their strategies. We are pleased with our choice for this year as it is both timely and of great importance. As wildfires continue to plague Northern California, having mental health professionals ready and trained to deal with the issues that come up in the aftermath is of fires is invaluable.
