COFEM Training Offers

Emotional First Aid Training Series: Building Compassionate, Responsive, and Survivor-Centered Support Skills

Interested in joining our 2027 cohort? Register your interest here.

We will share more details in early 2027, including session dates and timings based on participant preferences.

This online training equips non-mental health professionals, including experienced and emerging humanitarian workers, as well as feminist practitioners, researchers, advocates, community organizers and others working to address gender-based violence (GBV) and crisis, with practical skills, tools and confidence, to provide immediate emotional support.

Grounded in COFEM’s Emotional First Aid (EFA) tipsheet and feminist approaches to self and collective care, this course creates an interactive, cross-regional learning space focused on practical approaches to providing emotional support, feminist principles of care, dignity and agency, and self-awareness, boundaries and collective care.

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for people of diverse genders and across sectors, who want to integrate emotional first aid into their work and everyday lives, and build more thoughtful, survivor-centered, and feminist approaches to emotional care:

– Humanitarian or crisis response teams
– Frontline responders in GBV and crisis support roles
– Feminist practitioners, researchers and advocates
– Community organizers and volunteers

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the session, you’ll have:

– More confidence and practical skills to respond when someone is distressed or going through a difficult moment.
– Practical ways to offer empathetic, survivor-centered support while embedding feminist principles and values.
– Space to reflect on your own boundaries, well-being and capacity for self-care and collective care.
– A clearer sense of when to offer support yourself, when to seek additional support, and how to navigate referral pathways.

Contribution / Payment

At COFEM, we are committed to accessibility, equity, and collective care. To reflect these values, the Emotional First Aid Training Series is offered on a sliding scale, allowing individuals and organizations to contribute in ways that align with their resources and capacities. We invite you to choose the option that best fits your context.

Your contribution directly supports the creation of accessible and transformative learning environments grounded in feminist principles of care, dignity and solidarity.

For Individuals

This option is designed to keep the training accessible to individuals across different financial situations. If you have greater access to resources, we encourage you to contribute at the higher end of the scale to support equitable access for others.

Two-Hour Session: (Pay What You Wish: $25 – $75)
Half-Day Session: (Pay What You Wish: $50 – $150)

For Organizations

This rate is intended for organizations sponsoring staff or integrating this training into their professional development. Organizational contributions help subsidize lower-cost access for individuals and support the continued delivery of feminist, survivor-centered learning spaces.

Two-Hour Session: $600 – $800
Half-Day Session: $1,000 – $1,500

A Note:

Emotional First Aid is not therapy or clinical mental health training, and does not qualify participants to provide specialized mental health care, or replace it. Rather, as the Emotional First Aid Tipsheet emphasizes, this training offers practical approaches and tools for providing immediate, compassionate support grounded in feminist values of dignity, agency and collective care.

There are no quick fixes when it comes to emotional care. EFA is an ongoing practice of reflection, unlearning and collective care – inviting us to engage with care as a shared responsibility, recognize both our capacity and our limits, and to nurture more supportive environments for ourselves and others.