Dr. Angi Yoder-Maina is a practitioner-scholar in healing-centered peacebuilding. She is the co-founder of the Green String Network (GSN), a fully East African organization whose community healing programs have reached more than 148,000 people across Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. She led GSN as Executive Director from 2016 until 2024, when she did what her own scaling framework demands. She let go, transitioning leadership to the East African team the organization had spent a decade developing. She continues to serve the network through research and fundraising.

At Florida State University, she directed the Resilience Institute for Strength and Empowerment (RISE) from 2023 to 2026 and now teaches human-centered design at the FSU Innovation Hub, integrating human skills and artificial intelligence into the design process. A citizen of both Kenya and the United States, she immigrated to Kenya more than twenty years ago when she married her husband. Nairobi was home for two decades, the city where they raised their three daughters. She now divides her life between Tallahassee and the family's dairy farm in Nyeri, in the central highlands, where her husband, Maina, currently lives.

The Work

From a single healing circle in Somalia in 2013 grew a family of programs built on one methodology, culturally adapted seven times across four countries. Quraca Nabadda in Somalia. Morning Star in South Sudan. Kumekucha on the Kenyan coast, selected by the Paris Peace Forum in 2018 and again in 2025 as a governance solution to scale. Yegarachin in Ethiopia. Muamko Mpya, the first trauma-informed program inside an African police service, built with Kenya's National Police Service and evaluated across three phases. Arise and Shine in Abyei. Kumekucha Quest, a youth healing movement now scaling.

Each adaptation was rebuilt with local artists, storytellers, and cultural traditions. The approach combines watercolor illustration, narrative storytelling, embodied cultural practice, and peer-support healing circles, a deliberate answer to the limits of Western clinical frameworks in places where oral tradition is how knowledge moves. Her Four Realms of ACEs for Africa expanded mainstream trauma understanding to include Community, Climate, and Cultural dimensions, making visible the collective dimensions of suffering that individual-focused models overlook.

The model runs on a layered system of community members. Trained volunteers hold circles. Resource Facilitators, the senior knowledge keepers, train and sustain them. More than 500 practitioners have been trained and certified, and the underlying Wellbeing and Resilience Framework has been adopted by over thirty-five organizations and integrated into national policy in Kenya, Somalia, and Sierra Leone.

Beyond GSN, she co-designed two national governance frameworks adopted as standing government policy, the Wadajir National Framework in Somalia and the Wan Fambul National Framework in Sierra Leone, and served as lead designer of USAID's $195 million Transition Initiative for Stabilization in Somalia. In Mogadishu she co-designed Dan Guud, a public service pipeline that placed thirty young Somali graduates into local government. All thirty serve in leadership today.

Books and Writing

Her first book, Healing Is What Makes Peace Work: A Healing-Centered Peacebuilding Approach (Springer, 2022), built the theoretical framework for the field and has been translated into Ukrainian. Her second, Scaling Deep, Not Up: Reimagining Mental Health from the Communities That Already Know How, is complete and under submission. Her third, If You Are the One They Call: Community Care as Africa's Mental Health Infrastructure, is in development with six Kenyan co-authors, the Resource Facilitators who hold the practice, as an open-access multimodal book.

Her peer-reviewed work appears in The Lancet Global Health, the National Security Journal, and the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, with book chapters in the Handbook on Peacebuilding and Ethnic Conflict (Routledge, 2022) and the Routledge International Handbook of Trauma-Responsive Peacebuilding (2026), and a chapter forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. An invited opinion piece, written with twenty-one collaborators including community practitioners as named authors, is forthcoming in PLOS Global Public Health. She writes the newsletter Scaling Deeper on LinkedIn.

The Journey

Her work began in December 1992, as a Suncokret (Sunflower) volunteer in a camp for Bosnian refugees on the Croatian coast, during a year living and working in Europe. It carried her through election supervision with the OSCE in Bosnia, a Robert Bosch Fellowship in Berlin supporting Srebrenica survivors, and increasingly senior roles with the International Rescue Committee, USAID, and Pact across Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, South Sudan, Somalia, and Kenya. A decade of rebuilding what war destroys taught her the insight that drives everything since. Communities that had everything rebuilt around them returned to violence anyway, because the systems had rebuilt everything except the people. Her doctoral research at Paññāsāstra University of Cambodia (PhD, 2022) turned that insight into a grounded theory of healing-centered peacebuilding.

Recognition

• Dr. Guislain Award, Breaking the Stigma ($50,000), 2021

• Paris Peace Forum Selected Scaling Project, 2018 and 2025

• Top Innovator, Youth Mental Health Challenge, World Economic Forum/UpLink, 2022

• Alumni Honor Award, Manchester University, 2024

• iF Social Impact Prize, Kumekucha: It's a New Dawn, 2021

• SDG Action Film Award, Building Peace category, United Nations, 2019  (Kumekucha: It's a New Dawn. Mama Zuria's Backstory)

Education

PhD, Applied Conflict Transformation Studies, Paññāsāstra University of Cambodia, 2022 · MA, Public and Social Policy, Duquesne University, 1998 · BA, Peace Studies and Political Science, Manchester College, 1994