Outside the Bernice Elizabeth Fonteneau Wellness Center in Petworth, a historically Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., bundled-up passersby swerve around piles of melting slush. But the small room on the center’s third floor radiates warmth. “So happy you’re here,” reads the mat on the doorway, welcoming visitors into the softly lit space.
Inside, on what looks to be a park bench covered in throw cushions, Angela Jasper offers free, informal talk therapy sessions, creating what she calls a “safe, nonjudgmental space” for people to unburden themselves.
On the other side of the world, by a public clinic in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, Shelter Nhengo has a bench, too. “Sometimes all one needs is someone to talk to,” she says.
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In Zimbabwe, mental health care is expensive and even shameful. But a network of therapy-trained grandmothers, sitting on public benches, has brought comfort to 500,000 people. Now the idea has spread to Washington.
Ms. Jasper and Ms. Nhengo aren’t psychologists or social workers. Think of them, instead, as kind of volunteer neighborhood grandmothers – that is, if the grandmothers were trained in cognitive behavioral therapy.
The two women work using a model called Friendship Bench, developed by Zimbabwean psychiatrist Dr. Dixon Chibanda. The idea behind it is simple: In many places, formal mental health care is expensive, impractical, or even shameful. But grandmothers are not.
All told, more than half a million Zimbabweans have sat on a Friendship Bench in the last two decades, and recently, Dr. Chibanda has begun taking his model global.
But in late January, Dr. Chibanda received a curt email from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which helps pay for some of his projects. As part of the Trump administration’s three-month freeze on American foreign aid, Friendship Bench’s funding was being cut off.
Dr. Chibanda and his team were shocked. Their USAID grants were helping them train 45 virtual Friendship Bench counselors, among other projects. American aid money had also helped his organization train Ms. Jasper and her fellow volunteers in Washington. While a federal court ruled Feb. 13 to temporarily lift the USAID freeze, it remains unclear if the decision will hold, or if and when funding might be restored.
“It affects us badly,” he says. “And that funding was not only helping people abroad, but also Americans.”
Tapping the quiet wisdom of grannies
Friendship Bench was born of tragedy. In 2005, one of Dr. Chibanda’s patients, a woman named Erica, died by suicide after missing a session with him. When he spoke to her family members, they told him that she couldn’t find the $15 in bus fares she needed to go to her appointment.
“For a long time, I felt personally responsible for Erica’s death,” he says. “I wanted to do something to prevent something similar from occurring [again].”
At the time, Zimbabwe had, by one count, just seven psychiatrists, and many viewed mental health problems as shameful. This troubled Dr. Chibanda, who saw the traumas that stalked Zimbabweans daily, from the legacies of colonialism and government repression to the AIDS pandemic and poverty. All of that led to a problem known in the local Shona language as kufungisisa, literally “thinking too much” – or what Westerners might know as depression.
But Dr. Chibanda also noticed that those around him were not entirely without support. As in many parts of the world, they leaned on an invisible army of aunties and grannies, older women with quiet wisdom and the time to listen.
So he decided to formalize that system, training a group of older women in Harare in the basic ins and outs of problem-solving-oriented therapy. As there was no space inside the clinic where the project was piloted, the “grandmothers” did their counseling outside. It was the complete opposite of a frowning professional in a sterile room scribbling your secrets in a notebook.
Today, thousands of these semiprofessional therapy grannies – along with a few “grandfathers” and younger people, too – host counseling sessions on benches installed around the country.
“It’s a hard life, but I always feel better after talking to Ambuya,” says one Friendship Bench user in Harare, using the Shona word for grandmother. (We are not identifying either because of the sensitivity of speaking about mental health challenges.)
Bench counseling goes international
In 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued crashing over the world, a group of “grandparents” in Washington found itself asking a question similar to Dr. Chibanda’s. People around them were hurting deeply. What could they do to help?
At the time, the group was working with HelpAge USA, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for the rights of older people. The organization’s CEO, Cindy Cox-Roman, had read news stories about Friendship Bench, and wondered if the model might work in Washington, too.
So she called up Dr. Chibanda, and in September 2023, the “grandparents” found themselves on Zoom with the Zimbabwe team, starting a 10-week training to learn how they could use the benches.
Courtesy of HelpAge foundation
One of them, Scarlett Small, says that she wondered at first whether the Zimbabwean model would “fit” in Washington. “We have a different culture here,” she remembers thinking. But she was quickly struck by how many of the issues they discussed in practice sessions were the same across oceans. People were hurting because of money troubles, family problems, and fractures in the relationships they treasured most.
“I think most people that come are sort of all tangled up in their thoughts,” Ms. Small says. Friendship Bench “is an opportunity for them to speak out loud, instead of it going over and over in their mind.”
Dr. Chibanda has now brought Friendship Bench to several countries, including Vietnam, El Salvador, Malawi, Kenya, and Jordan, and he says many elements of the program have proved universal.
“We find that everywhere, the less emphasis there is on diagnosing people, the better,” he says. Instead, he says, the “grandparents” are taught to focus on giving people in pain “space to tell their stories.”
But now, he is worried about the struggling on the other side of the bench, too. In the days after the USAID freeze, he had to send 45 staff members home. Those who remain feel disempowered and helpless, he says.
In Washington, meanwhile, there are now 12 older people offering therapy at seven sites in historically Black areas of the city. And HelpAge hopes to eventually have one within walking distance of every person in these neighborhoods.
For her part, Ms. Jasper continues to look back on her time working with the Zimbabwean team with great fondness, calling it the “part of the program I cherish most.” In their expertise and empathy, she says, “There’s so much we learned from them.”
