Who's With the Trauma?
Susan Rudnick
Art Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor and Founder of Latimer Community Art Therapy
September 8, 2026
Audio
About this Episode
Latimer Community Art Therapy began on 17 June 2017, three days after the Grenfell Tower fire, as a passing thought between Susan Rudnick and her neighbours in a community centre they had opened by force. Within two weeks there were art psychotherapists in nine local primary schools. Nine years on, LCAT is still in most of them, still running open groups at the Henry Dickens community centre, and still employing young people it once worked with as children.
Susan and Beulah, who ran some of those earliest groups, talk about what those first weekends held: children who thought missing meant found, who would not put their names on their artwork, and therapists who could sit with disturbance rather than distract from it. Susan is clear about where she departs from standard disaster-recovery practice. Watchful waiting, she says, felt like abandonment. "Who's with the trauma?"
The conversation opens with the tower's demolition and the strange absence it has left, and moves through the open group model, why children in this community choosing to come to therapy matters after having their autonomy taken away, the organisation's survival through the pandemic and constant funding battles, and what legacy and justice might look like when the object itself is gone.
Susan Rudnick
Art Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor and Founder of Latimer Community Art Therapy
Susan Rudnick, Art Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor and Founder of Latimer Community Art Therapy
Susan Rudnick is an art psychotherapist and clinical supervisor based in London, and the founder of Latimer Community Art Therapy (LCAT). She lives on the estate where LCAT is based and set up its first art therapy groups three days after the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, placing art psychotherapists in nine local primary schools within a fortnight.
Under Susan's leadership LCAT has grown organically from those first groups into a community organisation offering open art therapy groups for children, school-based work, adolescent and parent-infant groups, holiday projects and a youth club, all built from needs expressed by the community rather than a plan imposed on it. Susan has published on the organisation's work and describes LCAT as largely women-led and working class, with resilience and reflective supervision at its core. Latimer Community Art Therapy is a small charity; donation details are on the episode page.
What You'll learn
- How an art therapy response to a community disaster was built in days, not months, and what it held for children in the first weeks that words could not.
- Why the standard "watchful waiting" approach after disaster can feel like abandonment to a community, and what it means to be with trauma rather than assess it.
- How the open group model gives children the autonomy to choose therapy, and why that choice carries particular weight in a community whose voice was ignored.
- How to grow a service from expressed need rather than a business plan, and what organic development looks like across nine years.
- What resilience, survival and legacy mean for a small women-led charity, from the pandemic to the demolition of the tower itself.