About STARS-C

Four years into the transition towards a post-conflict society in Colombia, barriers to the implementation of the Psychosocial Care and Comprehensive Health Services for Victims programme (PAPSIVI) and the Psychosocial Wellbeing Component in the reintegration route for ex-combatants (Resolution n. 4309) persist.

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Scaling-up services is important but only a partial response; sustainable solutions require dialogue between systems and communities to improve mental health. 

In response to these demands, our project will implement and evaluate a participatory intervention to strengthen community mental health care systems in two territories which are currently the focus of Territorially Focused Development Plans (PDETs in Spanish) in Caquetá-Colombia.

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Our partners, Corpomanigua, a women’s community-based organisation that works to enhance human rights, build peace, and increase gender equality, and The Cooperative for Good Living and Peace in Caqueta (COOMBUVIPAC) are critical partners in engaging with citizens as part of efforts to build better mental health systems from the bottom up.

 

Together, we form STARS-C, and we are working collectively to integrate bottom-up, community level experiences of mental health and mental distress with institutional responses by state level actors. Through the creation of a novel participatory intervention, we are integrating multiple knowledge systems to build better community mental health systems in Colombia.