Healing Trauma Training in South Africa

Sara Downham-Lotto 2025

Training community art facilitators who support healing trauma through art in 

under-resourced communities.

Early spring 2025, Sara ran a day-long training session for the community art facilitators team at the Buttefrfly Art Project in South Africa.

The Butterfly Art Project in the Western Cape township of Capricorn, South Africa – Encouraging Creativity and Healing Through Art.

Vision: Communities of healed people, with resilience, stability and creativity, fulfil their potential, while creating spaces for others to do the same.

Mission: To support people’s healing, especially children’s, from trauma through art.

What we do: We train and mentor a movement of Community Art Facilitators (CAFs) to provide psycho-social support through art therapeutic classes to children in under-resourced South African communities. CAF’s therapeutic art classes help children to stabilise through developing healthy coping mechanisms for processing stress and healing from trauma.

Why: Art is a medium that enables healing and promotes creative skills that can be utilised life long. This is important in a country where trauma exists especially in under-resourced communities. South African schools are in a state of multi-level crisis, exacerbated by the diminished budgets for arts in primary schools, resulting in most not having art in their curriculums. Creative development is an essential part of child development.