The Founding
Third Space Practice was founded in 2025 in response to a specific request. Zan Times — the independent newsroom reporting from inside Afghanistan, run by Afghan women journalists working under conditions of surveillance and risk — needed psychosocial support for its team and couldn’t afford to commission it. The work began pro bono. Within months it had been picked up by Free Press Unlimited, which has funded the programme since. The pro bono commitment carried the work until funding arrived, and has remained a working principle of the practice.
That founding moment made a wider gap visible. The conditions the Zan Times team was working in were not exceptional. They were representative of what frontline workers across journalism, human rights, humanitarian response, and protection work were experiencing at scale, and the support infrastructure that had partially served them was contracting fast.
The Gap
There is serious psychosocial work happening across the humanitarian and human rights sectors, much of it under acute pressure as funding contracts. The dismantling of USAID and the broader collapse in international development funding through 2024 and 2025 has removed large parts of the architecture that previously held mental health and psychosocial provision for frontline workers. INGO budgets have been cut. MHPSS, never well-funded, has been deprioritised. The volume of frontline work that is happening keeps rising. The support available to the people doing it does not.
The provision that does exist tends to have been designed around a different set of assumptions: that trauma is event-based rather than cumulative, that distress can be treated as individual rather than structural, that intervention can be short-term and episodic, that the institutional context will remain stable enough to absorb a clinical model. Those assumptions held more reliably in earlier periods. They hold less well now.
The shape of available funding compounds this. Rapid-response and short-arc grants, often the only money available, set up a structural problem for psychosocial work: support opens trauma, builds relational trust, and then ends before the work it has started can be safely held. This isn’t a critique of the practitioners delivering inside those constraints; it’s a question about what funding shapes make ethical practice possible. Third Space Practice was founded partly in response to that question, with a commitment to match short-arc funding with pro bono continuation where needed, so the work isn’t structured to fail the people it’s meant to serve.
The Response
Third Space Practice runs structured psychosocial accompaniment designed for the conditions described above: cumulative strain rather than discrete events, contexts that don’t stabilise, work that doesn’t have a clean endpoint. Programmes are held over time. They are paced, contained, and transparent about scope. They sit alongside the operational work, not above it as a clinical add-on. The intellectual foundation draws on existential, un-colonial, liberation, and somatic traditions, all of which take seriously the political and structural conditions that produce distress.
The practice is small, deliberately so. Work is offered in clear arcs: introductory support, minimum ethical arc, enhanced arc, and regional programme implementation. Scope and cost are transparent from the start. Indicative budgets are available on request.
Care, in this kind of work, is infrastructure. It’s what makes the work possible to keep doing. Under-scoped support doesn’t remove the burden of frontline strain; it shifts it back onto the people carrying it. That’s what Third Space Practice is built to address.