2025 Community Impact Report

From survivors stitching their stories onto cloth to clinicians building the capacity to transform lives through trauma processing — the Common Threads Project 2025 Community Impact Report documents a year of extraordinary work, extraordinary courage, and extraordinary impact.

This report presents outcomes from Common Threads Project's 2025 programming across active sites in the United States and internationally. It includes data on survivor participation, clinician training, program delivery, new research partners, and the downstream impact of healing on families and communities.

 

View the Storycloth Database

The Storycloth Database, a project headed by Lise Raye Garlock, CTP’s Director of Education and Art Therapy, houses information on collections of narrative textiles relating to human rights. Some collections are private, others are owned by organizations and universities. The Database is designed to grow and become a resource for anyone interested in stories made in cloth that portray human struggles — historical and contemporary, personal and universal — and how people use sewing images to convey important events.

 

Book chapter “Sew To Speak” by Rachel Cohen, in Groupwork with Refugees and Survivors of Human Rights Abuses

This chapter describes the work of the Common Threads Project (CTP) and how psychotherapy circles are used to fill a gap in long-term psychological recovery from sexual and gender-based violence in the humanitarian context, drawing from work in Bosnia, Ecuador, Nepal and The Democratic Republic of Congo.

 

Washington Post Article on Common Threads Project

Some trauma really is unspeakable. So these women are sewing their stories, instead.

 

Read Webster Geneva’s article on the Fabric of Healing Exhibition

On 26th June 2020, to mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Common Threads Project launched a 3D exhibition of story cloths made by survivors of SGBV in conflict situations.

 

Watch the video project that started it all

Over a decade ago, psychotherapist Rachel Cohen created a video project documenting the cross-cultural practice of sewing unspeakable traumas into cloth. This video was the seed that grew into Common Threads Project, an international not-for-profit.