Community As Holding Environment: Organizational and Immigrant Healing in a Restrictive Policy Era

Background and Purpose: Amid increasingly restrictive immigration policies and heightened sociopolitical stressors, immigrant communities continue to experience trauma, fragmentation, and systemic neglect. Community-based organizations have become essential agents of both survival and healing—offering services, advocacy, and spaces for collective care. In a climate of fear, exclusion, and re-traumatization, immigrant-based community organizations are anchoring themselves in care, cultural wisdom, and connection.

This presentation offers a practice-informed analysis rooted in self-psychology and collective response, exploring how organizations are tending to the wounded sense of self in immigrants while simultaneously nurturing community resilience and support for their staff. Drawing on descriptive case reflections, satisfaction survey data, and practitioner observations, the presentation highlights examples of how community organizations are meeting urgent needs while embedding trauma-informed, healing-centered practices into their programming. Case examples illustrate how organizations are hosting traditional and evidence-based practices, such as healing circles for immigrant communities, developing wellness series to address vicarious trauma and burnout among frontline staff, and organizing mutual aid networks to ensure coordinated, responsive support.

Methods: This presentation draws from applied, field-based inquiry grounded in practitioner reflection and programmatic feedback. This approach allows for insight into lived realities, affective responses, and collective practices. The integration of self-psychology provides a framework for understanding how systemic harm injures the self, while collective care efforts within organizations offer pathways for restoration and connection.

Results: Preliminary findings indicate that healing-centered practices embedded within organizational structures improve both client and staff wellbeing. Participants in wellness activities reported increased emotional relief, connection, and sense of belonging. Staff who engaged in wellness programming described feeling more supported, less isolated, and more capable of sustaining their work. Organizations also reported greater cohesion and shared purpose, emphasizing that healing practices not only meet emotional needs but also reinforce collective strength.

Conclusions and Implications: To effectively support immigrant communities and organizations supporting them under restrictive immigration policies, organizations must be resourced to embed healing and relational care into their service and advocacy frameworks. Staff should be equipped to integrate trauma-informed, culturally rooted wellness programming into existing models—not as supplemental, but as core to immigrant support. From a research perspective, further exploration is needed into the relational dynamics that foster restoration of self and community among immigrants and organizations—particularly through frameworks like self-psychology and healing justice. Applied research that partners with organizations to document and evaluate healing-centered approaches can expand the field’s understanding of community-based mental health strategies under systemic stress. Policy implications include the urgent need for funders and decision-makers to value and fund wellness infrastructure within immigrant-serving organizations. Policies should move beyond emergency aid to prioritize long-term mental health, sustainability, and staff wellbeing, recognizing the emotional labor inherent in immigrant support work.