Following November's murderous terrorist attack on the citizens of Mumbai -- India's largest city -- social entrepreneurs are applying creative solutions to help heal the trauma and channel reactions to the crisis into building a stronger society.

Following November's murderous terrorist attack on the citizens of Mumbai -- India's largest city -- social entrepreneurs are applying creative solutions to help heal the trauma and channel reactions to the crisis into building a stronger society.

Changemakers community members responded with their expertise and their ability to see solutions in the midst of violence and grief. Mental health innovator Bhargavi Davar's organization, Bapu Trust, helped organize free trauma relief training workshops for young people after the attack.

The tragedy “was transforming," Davar said, because it convinced her that it is important to examine the wider implications of her work as a mental health professional. "The model we have about trauma has changed," she noted while discussing the November attack. Today, Davar said, we understand that trauma "settles in the body and attacks the primitive part of the brain."

She has found that the effects of trauma must be addressed with "body-based work" that goes beyond mental health issues, her original interest. This makes it a medical challenge as well. Bapu Trust’s services include first aid training for victims and volunteers.

Overall, the program is "geared for healing," in this broader medical sense and will now be focusing on this type of work in the coming year, with a special focus on youth, Davar said. Davar was awarded an Ashoka fellowship in 2005 for her work as a social entrepreneur, intent on transforming mental health care in India.

Traditionally, patients have been treated "custodially" in India, Davar noted, meaning that patients are actually confined and sometimes even chained. Bapu Trust supports instead a "developmental" approach. It both advocates for a change in policy and attitude, and also provides services to patients that demonstrate the success of the approach it advocates.

Children have special needs in the wake of such tragedies and after the Mumbai attack, Vibha Krishnamurthy, a developmental pediatrician whose work as a social entrepreneur also won her an Ashoka fellowship, was worried that nobody was addressing them.

This was a real gap: after the attack, she says, she and her colleagues got plenty of "phone calls and letters from families . . . seeking guidance on how to help children with the psychological effects of the tragedy," she recalled.

In mid-February, she convened about 40 professionals from across India—counselors, pediatricians, activists—for a five-day workshop with experts from India, Thailand, and the United States to look at how to manage humanitarian emergencies. It focused on the psychosocial issues of children and families.

One of the sessions was about death and bereavement, led by a person who was frank about the great challenges of working with children in such circumstances. She offered simple but profound advice in terms that even an untrained outsider could follow.

"Adultification" of school-age children "is a risk," she said, “because while they might seem to understand grave issues, they may feel stigma over a sudden bereavement that causes their self-esteem to collapse. Keep in mind these are still kids.”

Amidst all the outraged reaction to the terrorism, here were four words—these are still kids—that are a reminder of so much that's at stake: who is most vulnerable, whom we might forget, and what the repercussions might be. "We hope to create a team of people who will not only be able to meet the needs of children in the event of a disaster, but will also serve as resource persons [for] their community," Vibha said.

During a tea break, she energetically described how to set up such a team in Mumbai: its size, how often should it meet, how to they stay motivated, etc. Amidst much agonizing about the attacks, here was something concrete and positive to do.

Ashoka Fellow Shaheen Mistri also found herself agonizing about what she could do after the attacks. Several years ago, she founded Akanksha, one of Mumbai’s best-known citizen sector organizations that works to educate slum children. She wondered, how could Akanksha respond to a crisis of this magnitude?

She found an answer by telling herself, "don't get overwhelmed, just do something and see where it goes." So, drawing on her experiences with Akansha, she tapped other Ashoka Fellows who had reacted to 9/11 in the United States.

From this, she assembled a list of resources that can be used with children after a traumatic event and circulated it to a number of citizen groups and schools. It is a collection of themes, stories, and issues for discussion. It highlights tales of heroism—firefighters, a railway announcer—and suggests activities, it but doesn't shirk from confronting hard issues.

For example, two of the suggested talking points are: "What does 'Let's agree to disagree' mean?" and "What does 'Unity in Diversity' mean?" These are not easy questions to answer, but getting children to discuss them might help them—and their broader community—discover what these nostrums truly mean.

By Dilip D'Souza