HSTAR Scotland

HSTAR Scotland was established to empower and facilitate support to women, including the newly-arrived refugees and migrants. We work with various stakeholders to ensure that women’s support provisions are responsive, effective and efficient in meeting our collective humanitarian responsibilities in line with the social justice and equality frameworks:

• HSTAR Scotland provides a healing environment for all women in Scotland over the age of 16 years while assisting in advancing their empowerment and rebuilding their lives after trauma and abuse.
• Our unique support provision aims at offering empowering care to enhance and support women’s resilience via free access to non-judgmental therapies, advocacy, and multicultural counselling: women assess and choose the best responsive therapy to support their own needs.
• Our Multicultural and multilingual culturally sensitive counselling support entails providing average 8 sessions support. Daytime and evening appointments are available, and face-to-face therapy support is available in Sterling, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. However, most of our therapists offer virtual or online / phone therapies.
• While we have busy assignments with limited resources, we pride ourselves in being able to keep waiting list for care support for women who experienced abuse and or trauma to less than 3 weeks.
• We also provide free support in several key areas including employability coaching, trauma support, informed parenting courses, grief and bereavement – group coaching, mindfulness and yoga online classes, trauma sensitive budgeting workshops, and advocacy support (legal, financial, physical and mental well-being, nutrition).

HSTAR Scotland adheres to strong ethical principles and professional standards, including in our recruitment of highly qualified professional people. All therapist, trainee students and volunteers are insured, vetted, DBS checked and undertake regular supervision and continuous professional development.

The organization has the following objectives:

• To advance health and wellbeing through the provision of responsive multicultural-multilingual counselling and therapy support for women (including refugees, asylum seekers and migrants) who are affected by abuse and trauma, and through promoting mental health care awareness, delivering focused training and volunteering initiatives, physical and mental wellbeing support programmes.
• To advance education through offering informative activities, training opportunities and lobbying initiatives in relation to mental health, abuse, and trauma: empowering engagement and participation programs for women and stakeholders regarding abuse, trauma, and mental health awareness.
• To prevent and relief of suffering for women affected by abuse and trauma at any level through initiating and facilitating care provision, confidence building and empowerment activities, offering guidance, assistance, and responsive support programs.
• To promote equality and diversity through celebration of cultural heritage and inclusion in multicultural Scotland and provide empowerment and capacity building support as a means of tackling isolation and promoting integration and active citizenship.

Through our objectives, we aim at stimulating, promoting, and assisting in empowering diverse women and families and enhancing their integration as new Scots in Scotland. We are able to facilitate this through initiating, developing and delivering responsive support platforms for advancing their mental and overall wellbeing as well as enhancing their social, cultural, economic and political participation at various levels locally, regionally and nationally, where feasible. Our ultimate goal is to enhance the diverse women’s mental and physical wellbeing, to advance their skills and positive life experiences, to empower them as equal citizens with full rights, dignity, respect and pride. We achieve this via not only seeking to eliminate abuse for women, but also empowering women to be and become active citizens and equal partners.

*This project is for women and girls only.

*Services provided in the following languages: Arabic, Cantonese, English, Farsi, French, Hindi, Mandarin, Punjabi, Urdu, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Spanish