Director and Group Facilitator / Supervisor

Mark has 30 years experience working as a counsellor and group therapist in the voluntary, statutory and private sectors in the UK. Between 2002-04 Mark worked as the Country Representative for QPSW in Northern Uganda, helping build peace initiatives with local NGOs, developing trauma healing programmes for people affected by conflict.

Returning to the UK, Mark began working with survivors of torture and other gross human rights violations at London-based NGOs Freedom from Torture and the Helen Bamber Foundation. In 2007, Mark founded Room to Heal, a therapeutic community for survivors of torture and worked as its Director until 2018. In the same year, Mark set up Groupworks International, to both further disseminate the Room to Heal model of community healing and to provide therapeutic support and supervision to human rights organisations in regions of greatest need.

Group Facilitator / Supervisor

Rim is a clinical psychologist and a lecturer at the University of Tunis. She has worked at UNICEF in Choucha refugee camp and with UK-based NGO, Reprieve, and its ‘Life after Guantanamo’ project, rehabilitating Tunisian returnees. Rim is currently a consultant with OMCT (World Organisation Against Torture) providing psychological support to victims of torture and supervision to its front-line staff.

Rim is the founding president of Psychologues du Monde Tunisie (PDMT), developing psychological support programmes with the General Council of Prisons and Rehabilitation in Tunisia and also providing support services in critical emergencies.

Rim is also engaged in a research programme focusing on both engagement and disengagement in violent extremism.

Rim has worked closely with Mark since 2014, focusing on the practice of therapeutic groupwork in an international framework for NGOs working in the field of human rights.

Group Facilitator

Yasmeen Haidara is a counselling psychologist. She was awarded her Counselling Psychology MA in 2018 from the American University in Cairo. Yasmeen has worked with refugee and migrant survivors of torture and sexual violence at Medecins Sans Frontiers, Medecins Du Monde, and St. Andrews Refugee Services in Cairo.  

Yasmeen has worked with Groupworks International since 2019, co-facilitating a therapeutic support group for refugee counsellors in Cairo.