Scaling Deep, Not Up:
Scaling Deep, Not Up:
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Reimagining Mental Health from the Communities That Already Know How
Reimagining Mental Health from the Communities That Already Know How
For almost twenty years, I have been building something that global mental health systems insist cannot exist at scale — community care that holds, without becoming clinical, without creating dependency, with the ability to be internally resourced.
Reaching the scale this crisis demands requires investment in what sustains it — not to turn community care into clinical care, but to give it the conditions it needs to remain itself. The circle is not an African invention. It is a human one — documented in mutual aid networks, faith communities, and peer support movements across every continent. What is African is fifteen years of evidence that it can be built deliberately, sustained without dependency, and made to hold even in the hardest conditions.
This book is told through the people who built it. Circle Keepers like Famau Ahmed and Kadzo Jally — who in holding peace for others, found their own healing. They engage because they can. That is not a small thing. It is the entire argument.
Complete manuscript, 75,000 words. Currently seeking representation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angi Yoder-Maina, PhD spent nearly three decades building programs across Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, and Ethiopia before the collapse of USAID in early 2025 forced a reckoning she hadn't expected. Everything she had built was supposed to be the exception to a system that required external funding and professional expertise. When the funding disappeared overnight, the programs that kept going were the ones rooted in community. The ones that stopped were the ones that had never been theirs to begin with. That recognition is the beating heart of this book.
She is the founder and director of Green String Network, which she built from a single healing circle in Somalia in 2013 into an organization whose programs have reached 148,000 people across four countries, measured with the same validated instruments the clinical world uses. She developed the Healing-Centered Peacebuilding framework, now taught at universities and used in policy circles across the globe. Her previous book, Healing Is What Makes Peace Work (Springer Nature, 2022), established the academic foundations that Scaling Deep, Not Up brings to a general audience.
Her work has been recognized at the highest levels of the global health and peacebuilding fields. In 2021, she received the Dr. Guislain Award for Life Achievement from the World Association for Psychosocial Rehabilitation, a $50,000 prize awarded to individuals whose work has fundamentally advanced the cause of mental health and human dignity. The World Economic Forum named her a Top Innovator in its Youth Mental Health Challenge. The Paris Peace Forum selected her work as a Scaling Project in both 2018 and 2025. In 2024, Manchester University awarded her its Alumni Honor Award, the highest recognition the institution bestows on its graduates. Manchester is home to the oldest peace studies program in the world, where Yoder-Maina's own formation began. That her undergraduate college sought her out thirty years later to receive its highest honor is its own kind of argument. The work has been consistent, and it has mattered.
The scholarly establishment has come to her. Scaling Deep, Not Up grows in part from an opinion piece invited by Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Global Public Health and Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center, one of the most influential voices in global health research, who sought out Yoder-Maina's perspective on community care as infrastructure. A chapter from her work appears in the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Trauma-Responsive Peacebuilding. She is a co-author on a piece in The Lancet Global Health examining equitable funding for community-based organizations in global mental health.
She holds dual U.S.-Kenyan citizenship, is based at Florida State University, and splits her time between Tallahassee and Nairobi.
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