Portlander Dr. Alisha Moreland-Capuia, and her husband Daniel Capuia, a native of Angola, are determined to make the world a better place.
They formed the Capuia Foundation with the goals that include health care, education, social sciences and agriculture. They’re meeting the health care goals at their clinic which they opened in the province of Cacuaco, a suburb of the Luanda, the capitol of Angola.
And now they’ll address their education goals since Moreland-Capuia secured a $100,000 grant to build a nearby center for trauma education and as a community gathering place, including an internet café.
Moreland-Capuia wears many academic hats and teaches in a variety of disciplines. She’s an affiliate clinical associate professor at Portland’s Oregon Health and Science University, and is currently teaching at Harvard Medical School as assistant professor of psychiatry. A trauma expert, she is the founder and director of McClean Hospital’s Institute for Trauma Informed Systems Change within the Center of Excellence in Depression and Anxiety Disorders.
To put it basically, she wants to help people overcome the trauma in their lives so they can be masters of their own destiny by extending the Institute for Trauma Informed Systems Change to Angola.
“I teach in multiple disciplines and have trained folks all around the world,” she said. “My ultimate mission is that when folks are trauma informed, and their systems are trauma informed, that systems are society are safer and better. So that’s the goal and I’m teaching and training to that end.”
Angola’s social structure is still suffering from the effects of a 27-year civil war that only came to an end in 2002 and that cost the lives of between 200,000 and 500,000 citizens. Angola had been under colonial rule by Portugal until its dictatorship was overthrown in 1974. Angola achieved independence the following year which brought about the war fought for decades by different anti-colonial factions.
The country is slowly healing but the 30.8 percent unemployment is high, especially for young people, and unemployment creates stress.
“If I’m chronically stressed because I don’t have a job, and there’s food insecurity and I’m struggling to make ends meet, that level of stress and that level of chronic fear, that is a form of trauma, especially in a country that has experienced the great disruption of a civil war,” Moreland-Capuia said.
Part of that healing has to include economic liberation, freedom and opportunity, she said. “And the best way to do that is to open up opportunities for greater academics, access to health care and opportunities to be innovative and be entrepreneurs.”
What that boils down to is that basic needs are hard to come by because of economic conditions, which creates stress that creates trauma.
That’s where the new center comes in, because it will provide the tools for people to be self-determined and overcome obstacles to economic independence. Ground has already been broken for the new center, which Moreland-Capuia projects will be completed by the end of fiscal year 2026.
Moreland-Capuia has already put her ideas for addressing trauma through teaching thousands of global leaders, which she says has the impact of 30-plus million, from what was learned and put into practice about to implement trauma informed system change.
“We trained these individuals and then have them take it back and make changes for the betterment of their communities and it’s been amazing,” she said. “So we thought, what would it look like if we too this institute and scaled it up and expanded it and took it to Angola?”
But Moreland-Capuia said she wanted to be “very strategic” and began by training five Angolans over the past four years who were taught her Training for Change curriculum model she uses at the institute.
“So they’re looking at things like the impact of colonialism and the impacts of civil war in order to help the country heal so they can move forward and so they can do things that they want to do for themselves economically and in a sustainful way,” she said.
In a video about plans for the new center, Moreland-Capuia gives a tour that includes the clinic, housing for visiting health care professionals, and a big empty lot of about a third of an acre where the new building will go.
She recently approved the architecture blueprints for the new building, which she refers to as an edifice, to serves as a place for trauma training, education and a community gathering place.
“This is exciting stuff,” she said.