“Ames” (she/they) is a Transformative Justice and Healing Justice facilitator and practitioner, writer, speaker, trauma survivor, mental health advocate, and founder of Healing Together, a global nonprofit working at the intersection of trauma healing and social justice. To date, Healing Together has trained over 10,000 local leaders in 28 countries to serve as community healing advocates, equipped with skills to support survivors of interpersonal and systemic violence and heal cycles of harm.
A survivor of orphan trafficking; child sexual abuse; gender-based violence; and transracial, transnational adoption, Ames has been navigating medicalized, traditional, and alternative systems for mental and emotional health for decades, and as a result, is passionate about de-stigmatizing and de-pathologizing trauma and democratizing access to healing centered care.
Ames holds a Master of Science in Nonprofit Management with a concentration in Global Studies from Northeastern University and certifications in Trauma-Informed Interventions (U.C. Berkeley), and Global Mental Health and Refugee Trauma (Harvard Medical School). She is also a facilitator of circles (T-Groups) at Stanford University’s most popular elective course, Interpersonal Dynamics, in the Graduate School of Business.
Ames has published essays on sexual violence, grief, mindfulness and social change, and healing. Her work can be read in the books Anatomy of Silence and The Unfinished Social Entrepreneur. She recently discovered her love of growing food and is co-founder of Resilient Together Farms, a collective, regenerative growing and healing space on unceded Miwok lands in the Central Valley of California.
FUTURE FOCUS
Amy “Ames” Paulson will be deepening their work of racial healing for BIPOC folks, offering healing circles for racial affinity groups as well as engaging in cross-racial healing circles through their Healing Justice work with educators, activists, organizers, and youth workers.
They will also be expanding their work from classrooms and community centers to the land, incorporating land stewardship, food growing, herbal medicine, and storytelling as it pertains to ancestral healing foods, as modalities for healing within and across racial and cultural lineages.
