Healing the Whole
Where individuals and communities create mental wellbeing, together.
Inala’s Story
Siddeeqa Gierdien has spent more than a decade beside people in their hardest moments. As a social worker, she worked across child services, education, prevention therapy and programmes for survivors of gender-based violence. Over time, a pattern became clear. Support given to one person, in isolation, rarely lasted. Real change needed the whole community behind it.
In 2018, she founded Inala Mental Health Foundation to bring a fresh approach to community health and mental wellbeing. Inala believes thriving individuals, families and communities are built when mental, emotional and physical wellbeing come first. When people are supported and nurtured, they are better able to meet life’s challenges as opportunities to learn, grow and transcend. Healthy, resilient individuals are the foundation of a healthy society.
Inala’s approach follows a holistic theory of change. Once a person’s basic needs are met, they can attend to their psychological and emotional needs. When every system around a child works together, from government, business and community to families, teachers and peers, change becomes possible and sustainable. This is why Inala works closely with each child’s closest support system: parents, teachers and primary caregivers.
“We often feel mental health is in the mind. But it’s not, it’s in the body.”
Siddeeqa Gierdien, Managing Director
Siddeeqa leads Inala as Managing Director and is a social worker in private practice. She is a trained Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM) and Community Resiliency Model (CRM) practitioner, and is completing a postgraduate diploma in Islamic Psychology. Her individual and group therapy focuses on survivors of gender-based violence, trauma, family dynamics, anxiety and depression. She also collaborates with private and non-governmental entities to create spaces where mental wellbeing and leadership grow together.
Inala’s Purpose
To provide educational and psycho-social welfare services to youth, individuals, families and communities to prevent and address adverse mental health concerns. We aim to achieve this through preventative and curative therapeutic work with our participants.
To work alongside individuals to take an active role in, and responsibility for creating their own wellbeing, the wellbeing of their community and the natural world.
Inala holds these values as our own: humanness, integrity, self-love, gratitude, honesty, kindness, forgiveness, transparency, accountability, mindfulness, belonging and connectedness.
We report to the South African Department of Social Development on our impact and our financials. Quarterly and annual reports are also shared with each of our funders.