Innovative Trauma Relief Access (INNTRA)

Our scientifically designed protocol allows 13 to 25 years old to spend 10 days together with mental health professionals and follow specifically orchestrated activities designed to (1) regulate and stabilize emotions, (2) reprocess the difficult emotions and significantly reduce trauma somatization with EMDR treatment and (3) prepare for the end of the program. Follows a one-year monitoring program to anchor the effect of the 10-day program, to mobilize and strengthen inner resources, and to monitor the emotional, social, educational or professional evolution of each participant.

INNTRA is an not-for-profit association created and registered in the Canton of Geneva in Switzerland. We have obtained the tax exempted status. We have a team of 20 (volunteer) professionals with 2 working at 100% and one at 50%. All the necessary partnership have been secured to launch our Pilot Program in Geneva in Summer 2022. We are currently engaged in generating discussions with the cantonal and federal authorities to engage the public institutions. The momentum for children mental health is paramount, especially due to the aftermath of the pandemic. Our programs correspond are a fit to a need that national mental health systems struggle to answer on a global scale.

Our customer segment and beneficiaries follow a multi-sided market rationale.

For our Trauma Resolution program, our customer market is international organizations such as those (some of them have already been approached) Doctors Without Borders, Astra Zeneca Young Health Program, My Child Matters (Sanofi), Save the Children, Terre des Hommes, as well as state childcare organization and associations (such as the ones with whom we are partners for our Pilot in Geneva 2022). The financing of these programs follows a non-profit business model where we would complement an already existing and well implemented NGO and strengthen their action by offering through social franchising our program.

As for our Wellbeing & Prevention programs, our targeting here is rather niche as we plan on focusing on small segments of international private boarding schools, first in Switzerland for the first 3 years. These schools are highly focused on prevention rather than treatment and truly care about student’s wellbeing and want to enhance their own academic and extra-curricular offer to very selective parents. These schools also support local business, value sustainable partnerships and place integrity and diversity at the core of their values, very much like INNTRA.

Surveys has been conducted with parents and our offers has been very well received. Next step is to approach private schools, to create a possible partnership.

In Switzerland, the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force has recently published the following in light of the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic: the 14-34 years old represent the age group most affected by severe depressive symptoms in Switzerland; an increase of 40% in the demand for in- and outpatient psychiatric care has been observed, there is a very long waiting lists for in- and outpatient care, and young people from socially disadvantaged families are the most affected.
These data are relevant and true for most developing countries, post covid-19.

On a more global scale, adverse childhood experiences (ACE) remain the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing any nation – which has been exacerbated with the covid-19 pandemics. Reports estimate that up to 1 billion of the global child population endures physical, sexual, psychological and emotional violence on a regular basis and today. Still today, 70% of the youth in need of mental health & psychosocial treatment do not have access to it and without proper care, children face a 49% increase in the likelihood of developing a serious physical disease when reaching adulthood or to develop acute anxiety, behavioral and cognitive disorders and other developmental impairment, or even high-risk behaviors.

With small variations based on the geographical area mental health professionals are either not sufficient in numbers or not sufficiently trained to treat efficiently evolving and multicultural young patients. Traditional mental health treatments are time consuming, costly, sometimes stigmatizing depending on the cultural background of the young patient and the results are not measurable. There is also a lack of collaboration between private and public sector.

INNTRA designs and implements multidisciplinary, holistic and integrative10-day EMDR-based program that have shown to significantly reduce trauma somatization as well as emotional suffering. The initial protocol was developed in 2008 by a group of child psychiatrists in Colombia with whom the founder collaborated before she decided to adapt and make this protocol suitable on a global scale.
Initially, our pilot program was aimed to take place in Dakar Senegal but the pandemics forced us to reconsider and focus on Switzerland first.
We have 2 types of programs which can be implemented worldwide: the Trauma Resolution program for children and adolescents who have suffered fr om physical, sexual abuse, bullying or neglect and the BodyMind&Art Wellbeing Prevention program, designed for children and adolescents who have not necessarily experienced any specific traumatic and who seem to be doing well but who are suffering deeply and are in need of help and support without knowing how to ask for it.

The format of both our programs follows a multicomponent phase approach wh ere some 20 to 40 participants and staff spend 10 days together in a secure and closed environment, and engage in specifically orchestrated activities designed in the phase 1, to identify and regulate their emotions (with art therapy, drama, music therapy and singing, mindfulness, breathing coherence, group challenges, meaningful discovery lectures and nature outdoor discovery). During phase 2, emotions are reprocessed with EMDR treatment in its group format) and in phase 3, we prepare our young participant to part and apprehend the next steps after the program.

We provide the possibility for local practitioners to be trained to our protocol (ToT) so they can run the program independently.

We offer also a one year follow up which we run in collaboration with local mental health institutions and independent practitioners’ partners. This program allows our M&E department to conduct standardized impact measurement across 3 categories: health, social life, and institutional support: 1) the most meaningful outcome is to report the mental and physical health improvement of our young participants, using psychosocial psychometrics; 2) through our 1year follow-up, we measure the sociability impact and economic integration; 3) extensive surveys will be used to evaluate possible work relief, transcultural treatment experience and interagency collaboration for the professionals.

Four organizations have been identified in Switzerland as offering similar types of multidisciplinary program activities. However, none of them provide a service quite like INNTRA that includes ALL of the following elements: a service considered psychotherapeutic with a pre-program diagnostic and post-program report, a one year follow up program, a platform for participants and staff to remain in contact, a specific set of local and clearly established partnerships with local institutions.

In terms of indirect competitors, according to the OECD, Switzerland has around 42 psychiatrists per 100,000 head of population, with a similar number of psychological psychotherapists. Although Switzerland has a fairly good density of specialists, this still remains insufficient to cover the demand that has substantially increased, especially post covid19. Switzerland is considered on of the best countries regarding this ratio.

The combination of a Monitoring & Evaluation standardized process + a one year follow-up program combined with the holistic and integrative approach constitutes our USP that separates us from competitors. It guaranty the integrity of our work, while providing the necessary guidelines for our know-how to be taught and later safely duplicated (through social franchising system). From our marketing research and assessment (all reported in our 230pages Business Plan), no similar advantage was reported from any of our competitors.

Cost of the Trauma Resolution program has been calculated to amount USD 80’000, a cost adequate to developing countries. Should this program be sold to an international organization, an additional and standard 12% overhead will be added. Should the organization want to duplicate the program within its own staff -who would have been initially trained by us prior – a contractual franchising system will have to be defined (the exact terms have yet to be defined with a lawyer). INNTRA will continue, through the franchising, provide one INNTRA M&E staff to supervise and ensure that the 10-day program is running smoothly and in accordance to the INNTRA protocol. Here the cost will be for the mission of the INNTRA M&E officer.
Any other organization located in developing countries desiring to acquire/purchase our program can also do so and the cost of the program will be based on the country GDP’s, again with the standard 12% overhead covering administrative fees and management expenses.

As for our BodyMind&Art Wellbeing Prevention program, the cost for each participants has been estimated between USD 3’600 and USD 4’500 to be aligned to the Swiss market.
As we want to distinguish ourselves on the Social Impact scenes and be true to our theory of change, costs could be proportionally aligned (within reasonable limits) as per family gross income, in the situation where we open our programs to public school and different social class family (which is one of our main objectives).

We intend also at some point to involve in the discussion health insurances. In terms of costs, for a group of 20 migrants for instance: our program allows the social and health system to save USD 80000, and to demonstrate tangible and measurable positive impact from the treatment within 10 days. Sustainable and long-lasting emotional, physical, educational, and social impact is to be demonstrated with our follow-up program. Substantially lower medical and psychotherapeutic healthcare costs in the long-term are also expected to be measured and assessed as part of our impact.

Three options of business model have been identified: a not-for profit model, a for profit model and/or a hybrid model. The financial and operational sustainability of the not-for-profit model lies on 2 aspects: (1) creating a robust (even exclusive) partnership with a specific foundation with whom we find ourselves aligned with and (2) explore further in depth our customer market of international organizations. Along with this business model we have designed a social impact model measuring the significant changes in the health and socio-economic lives of the participants as individuals. It also provides us with a tool to measure our evolution, our scalability, and our efficiency within the environmental, social, and governance standards specifically in relation to the fields of mental health and professional training.
As for our for-profit business model (we do have a 230 pages document available), we plan to align with mental health online market as and we are looking into offering resources and tools available to “alumni” participants as well as to members. Inviting youth “influencers” to take part of our pilot program to generate traction as well as invite them to become members to access our resources on our platform could be a way to access new streams of funding and generate revenues through sponsors which in turns, will foster both INNTRA’s scalability and sustainability.
In fine, a hybrid model seems to be the solution allowing both models.

-2 Trauma Resolution Pilot Program (Switzerland and Senegal) in 2022
-Business development and operation: Staff wages, Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) reporting, social impact analysis (social, psychosocial, and economic criteria, interdisciplinary research and publications, operational team recruitment and coordination, administrative fees, memberships fees and events
-Marketing, Fundraising and Communication

As the founder, I am willing to discuss as many options need be with potential investors, depending on common objectives, values and interest from either ESG or CSR investors, social impact or angel investors, etc.

Training professionals while running our programs is essential so we, founders in possession of the know-how, don't remain the only ones physically in capacity to run our programs. Our growth and our ability to scale up will shift progressively our main activity to engage mostly in monitoring and supervision of ongoing programs.
The "too few" amount of school holidays also restricts us from offering our programs more than 4 or 5 times per year - unless the child found himself in a psychologically and emotionally dangerous situation which would require for this child to miss school days and integrate our program amidst school days.

-Selected to integrate Geneus Health/MedTech/BioTech/Life Sciences Business Incubator Hub at the Campus Biotech Innovation Park (Geneva, Switzerland, 2019).
-Completed the Innosuisse Social Entrepreneurship Program (Swiss Innovation Agency, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2019)
-Selected (out of 75 startup in Switzerland) to follow the Social Impact Accelerator (SIA) program with focus on not for profit, organized by SENS and SEIF organizations (ongoing, 2021)

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