Meet the Team
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Our Story
Inala Mental Health Foundation was founded in 2018 by Siddeeqa Gierdien. In more than a decade working as a social worker across child services, education, prevention therapy, and programme design and implementation for survivors of gender-based violence, Siddeeqa saw the need for a fresh approach to community health and mental wellbeing.
Inala believes we can build sustainable and thriving communities, families and individuals when we prioritise our own mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. When we are supported and nurtured to create mental wellbeing for ourselves, we are better able to integrate life’s challenges as opportunities to learn, grow and transcend. Healthy, resilient, self-regulated individuals are the foundations on which prosperous, healthy societies are built.
Our approach is based on a holistic theory of change. Once an individual’s basic needs are met, they can attend to their psychological and emotional needs. Taking an ecosystem approach, we believe that when all the systems in which the child or individual functions (government, corporate, community, families, parents, teachers, and peers) work together, change for a child is possible and sustainable.
We work with the individuals closest support system (parents, teachers, primary care givers) for a more impactful, wider-reaching and sustainable change effect.
While we work primarily in the social services sector, we extend our services to private individuals and corporate companies to offer therapeutic counselling as well as tailored programme development for mental health and wellbeing initiatives within the workplace and beyond.
Our Mission
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.
Our Team
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.
