Foundational Helping Skills: Transforming Clients By Transforming Our Staff
At Untold, it’s important that we consistently equip our staff with information and training around best practices and the highest quality interventions in their field. As part of our desire to ensure our staff feels equipped and confident in their ability to navigate any client situations, we have committed to introducing a series of internally curated trainings designed to speak directly to situations, concerns, and challenges in the center counselor’s role.
Each year, the Untold Leadership & Development Team (L&D) hosts the Untold Learning Summit (ULS), a three-day regional conference aimed at fostering collaborative learning and growth among staff. The summit's content is driven by the annual Learning Needs Assessment (LNA), which surveys staff across all regions and roles to identify key areas for organizational and personal development. Over the past five years, the LNA has consistently highlighted a need for mental health and counseling skills training. In response, this year's ULS focused on delivering Foundational Helping Skills to all Untold staff.
What are Foundational Helping Skills?
The World Health Organization developed Foundational Helping Skills (FHS) and the EQUIP assessment tool to address the shortage of helping professionals in community health. In East Africa, mental health care is particularly difficult to access, with an average of just 1 mental health professional for every 100,000 people. In rural areas, this ratio can be as high as 1 to 500,000. To combat this shortage, it is crucial to implement task-shifting and task-sharing models that train lay counselors and non-clinical community health workers in delivering basic emotional healthcare services. FHS addresses this need by repackaging common mental health and psychological skills into easily acquired and implemented techniques, making them useful for any community health worker across various client populations.
Untold collaborated with Dr. Roscoe Kasujja, Ugandan national and Head of the Department of Mental Health & Community Psychology at Makerere University, to tailor the WHO FHS framework to the specific needs of our staff. As a certified FHS/EQUIP trainer and a contributor to the course’s original design, Dr. Kasujja worked closely with Untold’s Programs team to deliver the core FHS competencies to over 300 East African staff members. He customized the training by incorporating real-life (de-identified) case examples and referencing Untold’s existing safety protocols, ensuring the content was relevant and practical for the team.
New Skills for Untold Staff
FHS is a competency-based training that focuses on 13 skills that help to strengthen relationships, build emotional well-being, and support positive, supportive interactions for people providing services across health and community service fields. Foundational helping skills are useful for everyone we interact with – in our personal or professional lives – they are not specific to a particular counseling intervention or treatment type.
These 13 skills are:
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The Foundational Helping Skills (FHS) program includes three key activities: a 15-minute pre-assessment, a 2-day in-person training during the Untold Learning Summit (ULS), and a 10-minute post-assessment. In the pre-assessment, participants engage in a virtual scenario with an FHS actor while an assessor evaluates their proficiency in 13 FHS competencies. The post-assessment repeats this scenario to measure improvements and knowledge gained during the training. The FHS Training is experiential, meaning participants are fully engaged in role-play and group discussion throughout, rather than simply receiving didactic training. As a result, staff have an opportunity to practice all 13 competency skills throughout the 2-day workshop.
Staff Feedback
Overall feedback from the training was overwhelmingly positive. Many team members stated it transformed the way they approach conversations and problem-solving with clients. Some meaningful quotations from staff include:
“[The session on] empathy was the most interesting because I have been sympathetic with clients instead of being empathetic.”
“[I will apply] active listening and allowing clients to generate their own solutions.”
These quotes reflect a shift in mindset, placing the client at the center of their healing journey. While it can be tempting to "fix" or "problem-solve," true healing occurs when it is self-initiated and self-motivated. FHS training reminded counselors of the importance of creating safe spaces, listening, empathizing, and validating, while clients use the skills and insights they gain to advance their own healing.
The pre-and post-assessment model showed us that we can effectively use technology to deliver training across all regions and offered valuable insights into staff skill levels, both before and after the training. This approach, paired with a competency-based model, clearly identifies areas where growth is needed, enabling us to strategically plan ongoing support and development for staff. This approach, combined with a competency-based model, helps us identify areas for growth, plan ongoing support, and pinpoint staff with leadership potential. This data will guide the creation of a comprehensive Learning and Development plan for all staff, regions, and roles in the coming years.
