The founding story:
an interview with Stefanie Graf

In 1998, tennis legend Stefanie Graf launched the CHILDREN FOR TOMORROW foundation. To this day, she remains highly committed to helping children from war zones and is regularly in Hamburg to sit in on therapy sessions and share ideas with her team and project partners. In the following interview, Stefanie Graf talks about her motivation to support refugee children and why the issue is now more topical than ever.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the foundation. How has the work done by CHILDREN FOR TOMORROW changed over the years?

When I started the foundation, there were 40 million refugees worldwide. We were a small outpatient centre with four therapists, and many families from Kosovo came to us. At the time, we were the only organisation with a focus on helping war-traumatised children and their relatives.
Today, we have over 120 million refugees worldwide. The year 2022 saw the biggest rise ever recorded by the UNHCR – and there is no end in sight. The outpatient centre now has over 15 employees, and more unaccompanied children and young people are turning up there. Demand for therapy places is so high that we have been employing therapists at the foundation for a number of years and going into the schools with our HoneyHeroes! project. But we can never meet the many requests for therapy places.

Why is it so important for you to help traumatised refugee children?

The suffering of these children is often overlooked or misunderstood, and they have no lobby to draw attention to their pain. That is why it is so important to me to help these children with these ostensibly invisible illnesses. It is also often the quiet, reserved children in particular who need a lot of help. They have experienced unimaginable things while fleeing: the death of parents, long journeys on foot, hunger, torture, the fear of death. Once they arrive here, they not only have to learn a new language, but also integrate into school, get used to a foreign culture and deal with the psychological effects of war and having to flee. We want to help the children as early as possible so that they have a chance to lead a halfway decent life.

Although you live in the USA with your family, you visit the foundation several times a year. What kind of changes do you notice in the children?

It is very different for all children, of course: the quiet children get braver, make friends and, after some time, enjoy going to school. They learn German very quickly and become more self-confident. Over time, children exhibiting aggressive behaviour get increasingly better at being able to talk about and express their feelings. They learn to calm down and support one another. The therapy gives the children the chance to cope successfully in the school system.

Why is it so important for children to receive mental health support as early as possible?

Mental health forms the basis for their integration. You could also say that as long as these children continue to suffer from their traumas, the war will go on. They find no peace, have difficulty learning the language, distrust people and have problems making friends and concentrating at school. Only after the war stops in their minds can they find stability and embrace their new life.

Your CHILDREN FOR TOMORROW foundation has been cooperating with the State Ministry of Schools and Vocational Training in Hamburg for a number of years. What are the benefits of this?

The young children and their parents very often do not turn up at the outpatient clinics or therapy practices and end up falling through the care net for various reasons. If a child has suffered a traumatic event before the age of 11, the likelihood of them becoming mentally ill is three times higher. For this reason, we wanted to reach young children in particular. We don’t want their traumatic experiences to catch up with them later as adolescents as a result of their chronic suffering. That is why we go to where these children are – to the schools – and work in close cooperation with the State Ministry of Schools and Vocational Training as part of the HoneyHeroes! project.

What exactly are you doing with your HoneyHeroes! project?

We offer weekly behavioural therapy and art therapy sessions in a one-to-one setting at the schools. In doing so, it is important for us to include the people around them – the parents and the teachers, because they know the children best of all. We offer teachers training and supervision, explain symptoms and help them to deal with psychologically traumatised refugee children. With the parent meetings that accompany the therapy, we establish a level of communication between the families and the schools. We frequently have our interpreters with us in order to overcome any language barriers.

What is the advantage of visiting the children in the schools?

School is the most important constant in their young lives. This is where they learn, make their first friends and feel safe. And the school more often than not offers a more protected setting than the places where the children live with their families. What’s more, all of the children can be reached at school and we can involve teachers and parents in the therapy process much more easily. Another important aspect is the fact that many families would not make it to a therapy clinic on their own. This is partly because of the language barrier, but also due to the cultural perception of therapy. In many countries of origin, mental illness is still a completely taboo subject. By holding the therapy sessions in an everyday context, we want to reduce people’s reservations and remove hurdles for everyone involved.

What do you wish for CHILDREN FOR TOMORROW in the future? What are the foundation’s future plans?

For the future of the children, we would first and foremost like to be able to provide more therapy places, because in cases where a disorder has already been diagnosed, weekly one-to-one therapy sessions usually offer the best chance of improvement. As such, one of the goals is to establish cooperation partnerships with therapy practices that would like to provide places for refugee children. We are also in the process of planning therapy services under the statutory health insurance system at school locations in order to get the health system on board and improve therapeutic care for these children. Ultimately, we will do everything we can to ensure that our project can work not only in Hamburg, but in other cities. We also want to make sure that as many children as possible who are currently falling through the care net are given easy access to therapy services.

Ihre Stiftung CHILDREN FOR TOMORROW kooperiert seit mehreren Jahren mit der Behörde für Schule und Berufsbildung in Hamburg. Was für Vorteile ergeben sich daraus?

Die kleinen Kinder und ihre Eltern kommen in den Kliniken oder in den niedergelassenen Praxen sehr oft nicht an, sie fallen aus vielen Gründen durch das Versorgungsnetz. Dabei ist bei einem traumatischen Ereignis vor dem 11. Lebensjahr die Wahrscheinlichkeit, psychisch zu erkranken, um das Dreifache erhöht. Wir wollten darum gerade die jungen Kinder erreichen, damit sich ihr Leid nicht chronifiziert und sie später als Jugendliche von ihren Traumatisierungen eingeholt werden. Deswegen gehen wir dorthin, wo diese Kinder sind – an die Schulen – und arbeiten im Rahmen des Projektes „HonigHelden!“ in enger Kooperation mit der Behörde für Schule und Berufsbildung.

Was genau machen Sie mit Ihrem Projekt „HonigHelden!“?

Wir bieten im wöchentlichen Einzelsetting Verhaltenstherapien und Kunsttherapien direkt vor Ort an den Schulen an. Dabei ist es uns wichtig, auch ihr Umfeld mit einzubeziehen: die Eltern und die Lehrkräfte, denn sie sind die Experten für die Kinder. Den Lehrern bieten wir Fortbildungen und Supervisionen an, erläutern Symptome und unterstützen sie im Umgang mit psychisch belasteten Flüchtlingskindern. Mit den therapiebegleitenden Elterngesprächen schaffen wir eine Kommunikationsebene zwischen den Familien und den Schulen. Dabei haben wir sehr häufig unsere Dolmetscher dabei, um Sprachbarrieren zu umgehen.

Was ist der Vorteil daran, die Kinder direkt in den Schulen aufzusuchen?

Die Schule ist die wichtigste Konstante in ihrem jungen Leben. Hier lernen sie, schließen die ersten Freundschaften und fühlen sich sicher. Und die Schule bietet sehr oft ein geschützteres Umfeld als die Folgeunterkünfte, in denen die Kinder mit ihren Familien wohnen. Zudem sind in der Schule alle Kinder erreichbar und wir können die Lehrer und die Eltern viel leichter mit in den Therapieprozess einbinden. Ein weiterer wichtiger Faktor ist die Tatsache, dass viele Familien es nicht von allein in eine Praxis schaffen würden. Das liegt zum einen an der sprachlichen Barriere, zum anderen aber auch an dem kulturellen Verständnis von Therapie. In vielen Herkunftsländern sind psychische Erkrankungen noch ein absolutes Tabuthema. Dadurch, dass die Therapie in einem alltäglichen Kontext stattfindet, wollen wir Berührungsängste und Hürden für alle Seiten abbauen.

Was wünschen Sie sich für die Zukunft für CHILDREN FOR TOMORROW? Was sind zukünftige Pläne der Stiftung?

Für die Zukunft der Kinder wünschen wir uns in erster Linie mehr Therapieplätze, denn bei einer bereits diagnostizierten Erkrankung bieten wöchentliche Einzeltherapien meistens die beste Chance auf eine Verbesserung. Darum ist ein Ziel, Kooperationen mit niedergelassenen Therapeuten aufzubauen, die Plätze für geflüchtete Kinder zur Verfügung stellen möchten. Wir sind auch dabei, Kassensitze an Schulstandorten zu planen, um das Gesundheitssystem mit an Bord zu holen und die therapeutische Versorgung dieser Kinder zu verbessern. Letztlich werden wir alles versuchen, damit unser Projekt nicht nur in Hamburg, sondern auch in anderen Städten übertragen werden kann und wir möglichst vielen Kindern, die jetzt durch das Versorgungsnetz fallen, einen niedrigschwelligen Zugang zu Therapieangeboten ermöglichen.