Our Founders
Our Founders
Solid Minds was born from personal experience. Our Founders worked in a highly sensitive environment, supporting Genocide Survivors. Over time, the emotional weight of the survivors’ stories took a toll on their well-being. When they sought mental health support, they realized adequate services were hardly available.
Samuel Munderere
Co-founder & CEO
My lowest point in my mental health was when I first started working with Genocide survivors, hearing their stories, seeing what had happened in Rwanda, at the memorial sites that I visited, speaking with Genocide Survivors, …those events traumatized me and broke me down emotionally.
And so, it is from that experience my wife and I established Solid Minds Counselling Clinic in 2015 to create a safe place for people to come and get professional psychological support. I remember my mother encouraging me to come back to my job and she used very strong words.
My mother directly said: “How can you do what you like and you are running away from it? And, what is your next plan?” She said this because when I was growing up I told her that I wanted to study social work in order to do work with needy and vulnerable people, and contribute to making life easier and relieving pain for those in need and here I was running away from my job.
So, I made up my mind to come back at my job. I came the same, I was still emotionally broken down but I had this strength in me that came from the words of my mother. I was able to get out of my burnout or traumatic experiences through the support of professional psychologists. So, I could occasionally go and get help on self-care and so forth in a way to be able to look after my mental well-being and be able to support the other people in a better way.
As a survivor of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, I have walked the long and painful road of trauma, grief, and healing. I have also witnessed, time and time again, the strength of women; the way we rise, even when the weight of the world is on our shoulders.
In a country that has endured the worst of humanity, it was women who stood at the forefront of healing. We carried not only our own pain but also the burdens of our families and communities. Despite all we had witnessed and suffered, we nurtured our children, comforted our husbands and brothers, and held our neighbors close.
We became the backbone of a nation rebuilding itself from the ashes of tragedy. Women have the power to heal a nation. We are tender, we are listening, and we understand pain in ways that make us natural caregivers.
This belief is what led my husband, Samuel Munderere, and I to create Solid Minds Counselling Clinic. We dreamt of a place where people could find mental health support free from stigma and judgment. At the time, we only knew that Rwanda needed a safe space for mental health, but we did not realize just how deep that need ran
Ariane Uwamahoro