Community Outreach

The COVID pandemic has exacerbated already difficult working conditions for human service providers. To remain healthy while helping traumatized and under-resourced populations, human service providers – public health workers, social workers, psychotherapists, case managers, school leaders, and others -- need to meet primary needs that are addressed through our educational programming:

1. Emotional awareness – knowing what we feel and how it signals our values and fundamental human needs – is essential for sustainable human service work. The Jung Center’s programs provide tools for caregivers to process their own emotional experiences, so they can be more effective, healthy, and productive.

2. Isolation is a common experience among human service workers and a significant contributing factor to burnout. Jung Center programs provide structured spaces for real dialogue and connection, creating systems of mutual support within teams that reduce burnout and increase effectiveness.

3. The call to serve others comes out of deeply-held values that often emerge from personal trauma and resilience in the face of inequity. Jungian psychology provides crucial perspectives to identify how our woundedness makes us engines of healing for those we serve. In our programs, we help participants create strategies to ensure that their own self-care and healing process remains as important as their healing work for others.

The Hamman Professional Wellness Workshops

With generous gifts from The George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation, The Jung Center has been able to serve the community of those who serve others since 1996. Each year, we offer three three-hour ethics workshops focused on the personal experience of the caregiver, as well as two four-hour workshops led by locally- and nationally-renowned clinicians.

Self-Care Workshops for Human Service Providers

The Jung Center presents workshops on self-care for a range of human service providers, most at no cost. This population is at markedly higher risk of burnout, vicarious and secondary trauma, and other significant mental health issues due to the nature of their work. In one recent study, 48% of social workers reported high levels of emotional exhaustion related to their work. Organizations served include Texas Children's Hospital, Harris County Public Health, the City of Houston Health Department, Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, Houston Volunteer Lawyers, and others. In addition, we provide twice-monthly self-care workshops for staff of the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.

Building Resilience, Reducing Stress, and Improving Health through Mind Body Spirit Practice Workshops

The Jung Center’s Mind Body Spirit Institute makes the tools of meditation, mindfulness, and other mind body practices available to a broad range of those serving the fundamental human needs of our community -- from schoolteachers at Pershing Middle School, to frontline healthcare workers at Texas Methodist Hospital and UT Health Science Center, to community organizers with Fe y Justicia, to the staff of the Houston Area Women’s Center, and many others.

The Andrea White Expressive Arts Project and the Timothy Hollis Expressive Arts Program foster confidence and self-esteem in underserved children through the expressive arts. These weekly art classes, which serve the children in after-school programs at The Nehemiah Center and S.H.A.P.E. Community Center in the Third Ward, are offered free of charge to participants and the institutions. Using the principles of art therapy, instructor Diana Sanchez engaged the students in fun and challenging art activities designed to teach the students to value their own creative perspectives and to trust their creative voices. Additionally, The Jung Center’s Mind Body Spirit Institute provides essential training in stress management through yoga classes for children at S.H.A.P.E. Community Center.

Since 2008, The Jung Center has partnered with the University of St. Thomas to offer low-cost conferences that explore the complex relationship between religion and psychology and seek to educate clinicians (during our spring Religion, Mental Health, and the Search for Meaning conferences) and clergy (during our fall The Soul of Mental Health conferences) to use religious and psychological resources to serve their clients and congregants.

And since 2018, The Jung Center has co-sponsored training conferences on trauma, empathy, and resilience for Haitian students and paraprofessionals in Port-au-Prince. Our partners are the University of Notre Dame of Haiti and CESSA, the Center for Spirituality and Mental Health of Port-au-Prince. This conference is made possible through a grant from the Jones Day Foundation. Each year, attendance at these workshops has grown; attendance in 2019 exceeded 400, and during the COVID-affected 2020 conference, five Haitian television outlets simulcast the conference, reaching the entire country.