Healing Through Creativity: The Story of CFAW

What if healing wasn’t just found in hospitals, clinics, or prescriptions, but in colours, stories, rhythms, and the act of creating together? What if wellbeing could be achieved not through systems alone, but through community, imagination, and beauty; even when that beauty is raw or messy? 

This is the vision that gave birth to the Center for Arts-Based Methodologies and Wellbeing (CFAW), a not-for-profit organization based in Pakistan. Founded in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by two doctors, CFAW emerged from a simple but radical belief: that wellness can be cultivated through creativity, community, and care.

Most health systems focus on what can be measured: blood tests, diagnoses, and numbers. However, CFAW looks beyond that. It believes there is also wisdom in the things we feel and experience: our emotions, our bodies, our stories, and our creativity. Through art, storytelling, and trauma-informed practices, CFAW works to reclaim this community knowledge, showing that healing and learning don’t only come from data, but also from lived experience.

CFAW is not just an organization, it is an ecosystem of belonging. It is a home for creative healing where community voices matter as much as academic ones, and a place where vulnerability is held with care and beauty is embraced, even when it is raw. It is also a space for learning and unlearning, bridging generations, disciplines, and ways of knowing. At its heart, CFAW is a research hub rooted in practice, capturing not only data but also the feelings, stories, and lived realities that conventional research often overlooks.

In PEMA, a wellbeing program for the elderly, participants were invited to reflect on the “indivisible self” through art.

Canvas painting in PEMA

For Huma, a woman in her sixties, this became a turning point. She rediscovered herself as a storyteller, first writing for her own healing and now guiding others.

“PEMA is a journey to meet your own self. I am so glad I joined to meet myself… even if it is now (at the age of 60).” 

— Huma

Mangrove edits

Whereas, in Salehabad, children used recycled materials to reimagine their city, its hopes, struggles, and dreams. For a student, Azhar, working with clay and yarn sparked a new awareness of the mangroves and his connection to the environment.

“Had I not known through clay and yarn, I wouldn’t have understood what mangroves mean for us and what we mean to the mangroves.” — Azhar

Beyond these individual stories, CFAW’s work comes alive in three living, breathing streams, each bringing its own rhythm to healing and creativity.

Nani Ghar, resonating with the warmth and safety of your grandmother’s home, is a place where you can make mistakes, learn, and grow without judgment. Here, art becomes a shared language: community members and local artists meet through workshops, reading circles, performances, and programs like Artist of the Month or Baithak Weekly Art Therapy. It’s a space to feel, express, create, and share a place where people connect with each other, with their own emotions, and with the world around them.

The Wellbeing Hub brings together health and arts in a way that feels both practical and deeply human. It creates spaces where creativity isn’t separate from care, but part of it, woven into services, trainings, and even curricula. One example is Girah-e-Isthiraq (Knots of Collaboration), a two-week training held in Sindh in 2024 where local and diaspora mental health experts came together to build the capacity of public-sector psychologists.

Using arts-based, trauma-informed practices through storytelling, movement, and collaborative exercises, participants explored how to strengthen their own resilience while better supporting their communities. The idea is simple yet powerful: when caregivers feel whole and supported, they are better able to care for others.

CFAW’s Research Stream is where creativity becomes a way of asking questions. At the Karachi Down Syndrome Program, children explored emotions through painting, poetry, and playful workshops that bloomed into the exhibition Rangon Ki Lehr. In Gilgit-Baltistan, the project Dareecha used body mapping and circles of yarn to spark open conversations about youth suicide and mental health in schools, turning silence into dialogue. And in Nepal, AI-Sarosh brought together changemakers to reimagine maternal and sexual health through collective art-making.

These journeys remind us that research isn’t confined to reports or statistics it can take shape in colors, clay, stories, and the simple, brave act of sharing.

One standout initiative is the Mukhtari Project, which uses storytelling, yarn circles, and other creative approaches to enhance both the psychosocial wellbeing and technical skills of vaccinators in high-risk areas of Karachi.

Mukhtari challenge mapping activity

By focusing on their own self-care and communication skills, these health workers are better equipped to support children’s health, building trust and improving vaccination uptake.

As one female vaccinator from Malir District shared:

“While we were already doing immunization, this training taught us how to do it more skillfully, how to maintain our personal space, take care of our own wellbeing, and then effectively care for a child’s health.”

Public health often speaks in numbers, coverage rates, disease statistics, cost-effectiveness. These matter, but they might not capture the whole picture. Healing is also emotional, cultural, and deeply human.

At CFAW, dance becomes a form of meditation, clay becomes a medium for stories, and collages become acts of expression and advocacy. These projects remind us that healing extends beyond the clinic, it lives in shared moments, in collective creation, and in the courage to bring the unspoken into the world. CFAW shows what becomes possible when creativity guides care. 

It teaches us that healing is not only about mending what is broken, but about remembering what makes us whole. In times marked by uncertainty and division, CFAW stands as a reminder that healing is still possible through creativity, belonging, and shared humanity. Perhaps the real question is not whether art belongs in health, but whether true healing can exist without it?

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Acknowledgments: This blog draws on material generously shared by the CFAW team, with special thanks to Rutaba Syed and Soha Randhawa. Information was also sourced from the CFAW website and internal documents. All photographs included are courtesy of CFAW.