Intergenerational Trauma, Wisdom & Resilience – Exploring Trauma Affected Communities

Examining Collective, Cultural & Historical Abuse and how it can be avoided for future generations. Exploring their multiple functions and complex effects. Understanding the health and social challenges this brings. This keynote will bring a greater understanding of how to break the cycle within communities for the benefit of future generations.

Peter is The Director of The Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies located at Keene State College, New Hampshire.  Having worked in Northern Ireland for most of his career, he is a post conflict/atrocity mental health specialist with a wide range of skills and experience in the development of mental health and wellbeing services after community experiences of ethnically motivated violence, atrocities and genocide.

He has worked on the influence of trauma on the capacity of individuals, groups and communities to engage in peace-making  and reconciliation processes, concluding that the characteristics of the experience of trauma – specifically large group experience – mitigates against successful reconciliation processes.  He has most recently worked with USAID in South Sudan training frontline staff on the role of trauma in atrocity prevention, and works regularly with the Auschwitz Institute for The Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocity in their international training programmes.  He was the founder, 20 years ago of Carecall, now called Inspire Workplaces, which is the largest provider of workplace wellbeing services in Ireland.  Peter was Group CEO of Inspire for the past 10 years until 2019.  Peter has held multiple public chairmanships including two government roles, one dealing with openness and transparency across the health service following the hyponatremia inquiry, the other dealing with the legacy issues of the Magdalene laundries and Mother and Baby Homes.  He was the chair of NICVA, and Million & Me – a BBC Children in Need initiative to improve the mental health of young people across the UK.  Peter is a well-known conference and public speaker on these issues both locally and internationally.