About the Institute
The Palestinian Wellness Institute is a Palestinian-led nonprofit dedicated to culturally grounded mental health, community healing, and research rooted in lived experience.
Mission
Healing-informed, culturally grounded mental health support for Palestinians, integrating care, community, and research.
Vision
A future where Palestinians everywhere have access to culturally relevant mental health support, community connection, and research representation.
Jenny Farhat
Vision, strategic direction, partnerships, and program oversight.
Executive Director
Chloe Nahas
Clinical program design, supervision, trauma-informed practice lead.
Clinical Director
Medical DirectorDr. Sani Karam
Medical oversight, research ethics, psychedelic-informed frameworks.
Advisory Council SectionKarl Holland
The Institute is guided by Palestinian clinicians, scholars, and cultural leaders.
Our Advisory Council is currently forming.
Our Values
Dignity Every Palestinian deserves access to care without justification or performance.
Cultural Integrity Healing must reflect Palestinian identity, history, language, and lived reality.
Science + Spirit Together We bridge neuroscience, psychology, psychedelic research, and ancestral healing practices.
Accessibility Care meets people where they are: online, global, diaspora, multilingual.
Community Over Isolation Healing happens together. You do not have to carry this alone.
Liberation as Wellness Mental health cannot be separated from safety, justice, and human rights.
Palestinian-Led, Ally Supported Allies may walk alongside us, but Palestinians lead the direction and story.
Our Story
The Palestinian Wellness Institute grew out of a lifetime of carrying the weight of being Palestinian.
All three of us are Palestinian (part of the diaspora - do we want to include this?), and from a young age we have lived with the psychological and emotional impact of that identity, shaped by displacement, inherited trauma, grief, resilience, and responsibility to our people.
That lived experience is what led each of us into the health and mental health fields. We didn’t arrive here by coincidence. We entered medicine, therapy, and integrative and somatic care because we understood, personally, how deeply mental health and identity are intertwined for Palestinians.
Over the years, we worked independently across clinical care, research, and community support. And we kept encountering the same reality: Palestinian mental health needs are consistently underserved, and culturally relevant care is difficult to access or nonexistent.
We realized that working in isolation was not enough.
The Palestinian Wellness Institute was formed to bring our disciplines together, to create a shared home for Palestinian wellness that integrates care, community programs, and research in a way that is culturally grounded, evidence-based, and sustainable.
Our work focuses on three areas: • accessible, culturally informed mental health and healing-centered care • community programs that support identity and collective resilience • research that strengthens understanding and long-term outcomes
This Institute exists because supporting Palestinian wellness requires more than individual efforts. It requires infrastructure, coordination, and long-term commitment. We are building that infrastructure together.