This month’s CTIPP CAN call discussed why “traditional” community change models fall short and how trauma-informed engagement can build capacity and lasting change. We shared wisdom and learnings from communities engaged with trauma-informed efforts and provided time for discussion, reflection, and networking.
Presentation slides and the independent reflection activity from the webinar
CTIPP's Guide to Trauma-Informed Change
CTIPP's Wisdom from the Fields of Neuroscience, Epigenetics, ACEs & Resilience (NEAR Science)
Resource: Using systems-mapping to address Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and trauma: A qualitative study of stakeholder experiences (National Institutes of Health)
Resource: Self-healing communities report (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)
Take action: Support Federal Legislation: CMWRA and RISE
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
TI Community Change
[00:00:00] Thank you all so much for joining this August 2024 CTIPP CAN call. It's a pleasure to be with you all today and I am grateful as always for our CTIPP CAN or Community Advocacy Network call. We look forward to it every single month. We have an exciting update about CTIPP CAN, as we have a new ebook about trauma informed advocacy, which like all of our resources will be free that we expect is going to be released next month as it's in its final stages of editing.
Now, with that release. CTIPP CAN calls after this one through the end of the year will function more like a community of practice where we're going to be bringing together trauma informed advocates from all over the country working in different geographic and policy areas to learn together and [00:01:00] support each other as we promote trauma informed approaches to our advocacy as we continue to promote trauma informed policies and practices.
We are doing this at the same time that we are working on this with youth advocacy groups as well and we are excited for this step in our work as we continue to build a multi generational movement. We invite all of you and anyone else you think might be interested to join us for the next Four months as we prepare for 2025 and we expect that group will continue to grow much more beyond just that.
In addition to the normal monthly call, which will remain at the same time and with the same link, we will also have office hours every month to check in and further support advocacy efforts. I believe that my wonderful teammates are putting information in the chat where you can register and we hope that folks will join all of those sessions.
Thank you. All right, so back to today's presentation, which I have tried to synthesize as best as [00:02:00] possible, yet I want to recognize is a lot of information. Trauma informed approaches to community change have been shown to be impactful in a variety of contexts. I'm going to dive into CTIPP's toolkit on trauma informed community change, as well as work that we are doing to build population level resilience through community led action in advance of widely traumatizing events, such as the impacts of the climate ecosystem biodiversity catastrophe that we are experiencing globally, and then a couple of advocacy opportunities opportunities.
Thank you. a reflection exercise, and then breakout rooms for those of you who are able to stay on past the hour. But before we get there, I'm going to speak to the need for trauma informed approaches as we work to create healthier systems so that all individuals, families, and communities have the opportunities and supports necessary to thrive.
At the root of so many issues that our society is grappling with today, we find trauma. When there is [00:03:00] a root cause of a linked set of public health outcomes, it is called a syndemic. Just to give credit, I learned that from Dan German, who was on the call today.
So frequently, we, we deal with each of these issues by themselves.
And this work is critical to address the stress our society faces from each of these issue areas. Um, and and this is critical work to address the stress that our society faces from each of these issue areas, but we must also address the root cause if we are truly going to transform society toward one that does not perpetuate such horrible outcomes, which is why trauma informed approaches are necessary when we talk about trauma.
The focus is so often, if not exclusively at times, on the individual. Too frequently, we put the onus and burden of well being on individuals alone and fail to recognize how traumatized systems, which perpetuate stress and adversity disproportionately on marginalized people and groups of people, [00:04:00] promote the negative outcomes at the individual level that we are working to address.
Policy has the power to create conditions that allow for people to thrive. Of course, we know that far too frequently, the opposite is done, and policies create conditions that lead to harm and perpetuate trauma. But this is why we do the work that we do. So that all individuals, families, and communities have the opportunities and supports necessary to thrive.
To create conditions that ensure that we are making lives better across the social ecological framework as we saw on the last slide, we need to take a public health approach. Our systems currently promote a treatment first mentality, while we must pay mind to treating the needs that exist today. We must also work to intervene as early as possible and most powerfully prevent as much harm as possible in the first place.
If we do not have a proactive approach that matches our reactive efforts, we will ensure that more of the same problems we face [00:05:00] today continue into the future. We cannot. treat our ways out of the problems that we face today. We must address the root causes and work upstream to prevent as much as possible.
While at times it is difficult to imagine or measure what we keep from happening, it's not impossible. And we have seen many examples of community being the medicine that we need, perhaps none more powerfully measured. than what has become known as self healing communities, which is a report that highlights the work of Washington State Family Policy Council from 1994 to 2011.
In the last 12 years of their work, they trained more than 40 communities in a combination of trauma informed approaches and systems thinking, as well as sustained investment in those communities to allow their work to continue, which set into motion a set of positive outcomes across the communities they worked with.
Their belief was that leaders existed throughout community, and they worked to nurture and expand that leadership, so [00:06:00] that folks bought into the process for the long term. Their focus was on addressing the root cause of several problematic outcomes that the state was facing, and their focus was on community led plans that they held the communities that they worked with accountable to.
While promoting learning and ongoing development of the plans that communities had as time went on, and they learned what was working and what was not working, the work looked different across communities. And again, they were focused on addressing the root causes of several problems, not just putting the money directly into the symptoms of the problem that were directly observable, but instead finding systemic solutions to what was driving the problems in the first place.
Across the communities that they worked with, as you can see from the charts on the right side of this slide, they outperformed the communities that opted out of working with the Family Policy Council widely. In one county, they reduced youth suicide and suicide attempts by 98%, while simultaneously [00:07:00] decreasing juvenile justice system involvement, birth to teen parents, as well as increasing high school graduation rates by about half.
By centering community decision making and building what they called general community capacity, they created tremendous outcomes across the communities they worked with, and therefore widely throughout the state. In addition to and because of the remarkable outcomes discussed on the prior slide, and many more that were accomplished, they generated more than 1 billion in cost avoidance over the lifespan of their work.
You can see on the screen how this cost avoidance was measured. What we know is that if the work had continued beyond just the 17 years of the work by the Family Policy Council, which again was predominantly focused on a 12 year period following the publishing of the ACES study in 1998, though we cannot ignore the readiness and relationships developed in the first five years of their work and how that enhanced the work of the last dozen or so years, there was a measured cost avoidance that equaled a greater than [00:08:00] 35 X return on investment.
This work is important on a number of levels, and the fact that it cannot just economically sustain itself, but also scale over time and work to create opportunities for investment in other areas is incredibly important. We know that if this work had continued longer, the return on investment would have been exponentially higher.
At the 20 to 30 year marks, when children who were born into this work started to have children of their own, we would anticipate a reduction in the transmission of intergenerational trauma, which would have transformative effects, and that would be true for many generations in the future. It creates a transformative vision of where this work can lead.
So how do we start with this work in different communities? First, we want to think about how we operationalize these six principles from SAMHSA's framework when we are doing trauma informed work. Being trauma informed is not just about [00:09:00] labeling ourselves as such, but is a commitment to an ongoing process of learning and growth based in these principles and others that are important to the communities and organizations that we are working with.
How do we promote safety, including physical safety as well as psychological, social, and moral safety? Are we being transparent and earning others trust, or do we simply demand it due to power imbalances? Are we creating conditions of empowerment, voice, and choice so that folks are genuinely able to engage and contribute in meaningful ways to the best of our ability?
Is true collaboration occurring and do people feel valued? In what ways are we perpetuating oppressive cultures and marginalizing any person or group of people, whether intentionally or unintentionally? And are we building a culture in which we are provided with safe spaces? skills to support ourselves, and are we building community so that peers feel as though they are equipped and able to support others as well?
We will never be perfect in doing this, but I believe that being trauma informed is in the [00:10:00] pursuit of living into these qualities more than it is boasting that we have simply achieved them. In addition to using a trauma informed approach, it is important to address community level change through systems thinking.
Frequently, we try to address problems with linear thought. Believing that if we do X, then Y outcome will occur. Humans and communities are not so simple. While this thinking may be good for simple processes, when doing community work, we are dealing with complex systems. That does not mean that every solution itself needs to be complicated.
But simple solutions must be developed with an understanding of the complex ecosystems that they are being embedded in if they are going to be successful over the long term. The map above, which I recognize is not that easily viewed on this slide, is a systems map done by the Rural Opportunity Institute and their community to address ACEs and trauma, which you [00:11:00] ResearchGate in a report by Vu et al.
You will see that systems are impacted by forces that heal, unexamined beliefs, unexamined responses, indicators of health, and various biases such as racism that interplay a complex dynamic that drive the cycles of trauma. When we pull together systems thinking and the trauma informed principles discussed on the last slide at a minimum, in addition to other important processes highlighted by the community, we create a powerful foundation from which to move forward.
While this was all a pretty high level overview, let's dive into CTIP's toolkit that highlights trauma informed community models more deeply. This report, which I believe is about to be posted in the chat, contains an in depth look at what helps and hinders the development of trauma informed community change.
We know that trauma informed work in communities will look different from community to community based on its populations, needs, resources, and desires. So this guide [00:12:00] does not prescribe action, but pulls out promising and emerging practices and otherwise synthesizes existing resources and models to support considerations and wonderments for communities to take.
There are a number of reasons that traditional community change efforts do not work as well as the trauma informed change efforts do. Think back to this endemic slide in the systems map and too frequently multiple efforts are formed to address the various pedals and outcomes without working together to address the root cause drivers of the outcomes that we are trying to solve.
Again, it is all right to have simple solutions. A lot of times they are very important and useful, but they need to be created with an understanding of how they fit into the complex systems and dynamics. The multidimensional nature of the issues that we are working to address, as well as the individuals, families, and communities that we are working alongside and with, must be respected if we are to find solutions to wicked [00:13:00] problems.
And far too frequently, in community change efforts, it becomes a group of people or an organization that are trying to change a community. Rather than an engaged process that creates conditions of empowerment and safety for the community itself to be engaged and lead these processes of change, which not just leads to better outcomes that we track, but also creates a greater likelihood of sustainability for these efforts.
We must move beyond, or at least at first be willing to critically examine, existing power, paradigms that further inflict trauma and therefore limit the impact of the positive community change we are hoping to create. It is important to acknowledge barriers that may emerge as we work toward trauma informed communities.
Many people who could benefit most from a trauma informed lens may struggle to engage with these efforts as largely volunteer efforts can thwart engagement for those who don't have the privilege to do work without pay. Others [00:14:00] who have been harmed by systems and or are historically marginalized may not want to engage in systems change efforts or trust that it is safe or worthwhile to do so.
For trauma informed initiatives, we need to be intentional about engaging diverse lived experiences and intentional to reach out to these audiences from the beginning and over time. Creating a sense of belonging, which can only be done by really seeing, hearing, and valuing people over time, is critical to bridging existing gaps.
For far too long, we have allowed the community fabric of our country to fray, and it will take time to remend this, but trust is built through consistent action over time. Folks with a trauma history and trauma impacted communities may not feel a meaningful sense of belonging to the community in which they live in.
These barriers require intention if we are going to engage in truly trauma informed approaches. Generating a shared language and understanding about how trauma impacts individuals, families, communities, and systems is critical to supporting progress in this [00:15:00] work. There is an important difference between community based and community led, where community based is often an agency or organization that is located in and serves the community, but does not necessarily share decision making with community members.
We want to promote community led, trauma informed, prevention oriented, resilience building, and healing centered practices, which community based organizations can be a huge part of, but it needs to engage community members in the decision making. An abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset is most easily accessed through a sharing of resourceseconomic, social, and human capitalamong its various other forms, which can unlock a future based orientation that builds a realistic sense of hope and helps keep this work going for the long haul.
There are so many reasons, as we've discussed already, that trauma informed approaches are necessary. The benefits can be widespread, from the individual level of self efficacy and accountability and ownership, to the [00:16:00] broader benefits of greater equity and justice and community connection and cohesion.
There is a tremendous amount of research highlighting the epidemic of isolation and loneliness our country is facing, and trauma informed approaches help to build a greater sense of community that serves as a powerful antidote to that. These benefits, and so many others, make this work necessary. In our report that looks at a number of community change models, We found nine common elements that create important considerations for building capacity and engaging communities in trauma informed change.
It is important to align the work with the priorities expressed by the community while also being realistically adaptable and responsive to what may come up along the way. We know that this work will change, emerge, and evolve in processes that layer and loop learning over time. While we would not achieve much if we are always changing goals, we must also refrain from being overly rigid.
A process orientation with specific short term and intermediate goals [00:17:00] provides a framework for action and reflection that ensures responsiveness while making progress. Outcomes are the product of a good process in system syncing. This allows people to integrate principles within their loci of control that allows for sustainability and scalability of efforts as community continues to grow and evolve.
We need to recognize that communities are living systems, which are both nested within larger systems while also having smaller micro systems that they impact. And these systems are constantly interacting with each other. Embedding the work in a more holistic vision beyond just individual moral failings and models of mental illness is important to create a more hopeful future.
It is not an either or. But a both and where individual capacity and contribution remains important while not losing sight of the interaction between all levels of our society, which helps to promote prevention and systems level work to promote the best outcomes possible when we work with families, [00:18:00] institutions and more.
It's about healing harm where it has happened, not disrupting positive progress, and recorrecting where systems have failed and are failing to ensure that individuals and families and institutions and therefore the community as a whole can truly thrive. This work is about playing a long game, so we must give consideration to multi generational support.
We cannot only support the next generation of adults and work to promote healthy childhood development in a vacuum. This work is critical and also is impacted by the adults in their lives and the broader community at large today. We must recognize the significance of community context and create conditions of safety in all of its forms throughout the community, engendering trust in community members to promote well being for everyone, leverage their wisdom, establishing trust with systems to support the community at large. We do not need to wait for legislation to inspire action. There is work that can be done to support well being now, which can also then [00:19:00] increase the likelihood of legislation itself to further support and facilitate positive development within the community.
Centering approaches to mobilize existing capacities and resources is critical to creating conditions of empowerment, promoting senses of agency to enact change, and noticing and growing wisdom and strength in ourselves and others. This creates a sense of shared ownership and mutual commitment to achieving shared goals.
This promotes a shift from a scarcity mindset and competition of resources to more collaborative efforts that promote thriving instead of merely surviving. Research shows that this connectedness and honoring multiple perspectives is critical in effective community transformation efforts. Education and training is critical so we can act in alignment with what we know creates conditions of safety and empowerment, act on shared values, and hold accountability across various contexts.
We encourage consideration for how to make these [00:20:00] opportunities both ongoing and diverse. Many communities focus on only sharing these trainings with professionals, which is important, but creating opportunities like screenings of films and facilitated community discussions, community events that have training available and train the trainers across the community are critical in embedding this work deeper in the community and creating a process that can truly be community led.
Both formal and informal learning opportunities have power to make choices for ourselves and our communities to generate ongoing commitment and a sense of belonging. And it is critical in training to not mistake a single training session to be the end of the work or what creates trauma informed care.
We must emphasize in all trainings the process of learning and growth over time. Neuroscience, epigenetics, ACEs, which necessitates further exploration of the multiple realms of ACEs and also positive childhood experiences, and resilience is a helpful framing to show the universality [00:21:00] of why trauma informed approaches can be so powerful.
We can look to near sciences to support each other, noticing adaptivity and strength in bringing people together and engaging in this change work. We have a full resource on our website going deeper into this. If any of you are interested, I believe that it is being posted in the chat. From a neuroscience perspective, when we are under overwhelming stress, our functional cognitive abilities drop.
This is evolutionarily adaptive, as short lived stressors for humans generally meant that we had to escape, and so the fight flight freeze fawn faint response that kicks in is critical in helping us survive short term threats. But when that stress is prolonged, this evolutionary response can wreak havoc on our human systems.
If we don't understand how trauma impacts us or others, we can see behaviors that we perceive as defiant or rude when through a trauma informed lens, we understand that there [00:22:00] is great need for compassion and empathy and support. Epigenetics is an emerging field of science that shows how stress not only impacts ourselves, but can also make changes to our genes and be passed down to future generations.
This may sound like it's just a bad thing, but it also gives hope for multi generational advancement as we create healthier and less stressful environments, we will promote healthier future generations, and the benefits of doing so will continue to ripple out over time. The original ACEs study that looked at adverse childhood experiences shows the powerful correlation of early childhood adversity and health and social outcomes throughout the lifespan.
The multiple realms of ACEs have expanded beyond just adverse childhood experiences to include adverse community environments like racism and violence, atrocious cultural experiences like genocide and war, and adverse climate experiences such as a hurricane or wildfire. Thank you. Aces are not automatically traumatic as trauma is in the [00:23:00] perception of an event or series of events, but aces across all realms create multiple dimensions of common experiences that are stressful and may be traumatic.
And finally, resilience provides hope. Not just to bounce back as the general definition of resilience means in engineering or physics, but that we as humans have the capacity to withstand the stressors that we face and to grow through them with appropriate resources and supports, of course. The concepts of post traumatic growth and post traumatic wisdom and transformational resilience that through these experiences we can grow stronger and learn as individuals and across the social ecological model brings hope to this work that we do.
So as we organize in communities, keeping these various elements in mind can be very helpful and important. We know that this work is too frequently expected to be done by volunteerism, which is unfair and unsustainable. While many times we must start efforts through volunteerism or [00:24:00] taking on additional work, which is exactly how CTIP and other initiatives that I've been involved with launched, as all forms of capital are valuable.
I would argue that time and human capital are the most valuable resources. We must understand that economic capital becomes important for sustainability and scalability, and finding opportunities to come together and conceptualize funding is critical for sustaining and scaling efforts over time.
Looking at policy levers that can support initiatives philanthropy, whether that be individual donors, foundations or corporate giving that will enable community led work to proliferate and other opportunities are important considerations. As we build out community frameworks, we need to ensure that funding does not take away from what the community truly wants or needs.
So generating funding streams from various sources over time can help to ensure Power over ultimate decision making is maintained at the community level, even with financial ebbs and flows. Development is an ongoing [00:25:00] process and is more difficult for some communities than others, depending on existing resources that can be tapped into.
A part of the long term work that I am doing is around trying to create economic vehicles that allow us to share in the cost avoidance that is generated by this work, like what we saw in Washington state. To sustain and scale these initiatives over time. That's a long term solution that I do believe is going to emerge, but in the meantime, and even then other funding opportunities are critical.
Building resilience in communities has taken on an increasingly important role as we have seen the pitfalls of emergency response efforts at various levels. Supporting the expansion of an empirical understanding of what truly builds community leadership and participation helps ease the burden of needing to work through existing insufficient frameworks that currently exist.
Community based participatory research and empowerment evaluation can help communities feel like academics aren't just coming in and getting what they need and then leaving, [00:26:00] but rather feel supported and heard from to inform the importance of direct, the important directions of this work. And finally, maximizing protective and resilience factors while mitigating risk and vulnerability factors allows us to zoom out to what we need to co create the initiatives and efforts that will meet the complex needs of community members.
The intentional reduction of fragmented care has and service delivery brings about a greater sense of community, agency, and better outcomes overall. Working to integrate, coordinate, and align across the various community resources now and in the future are necessary to heal the ways in which trauma has fragmented existing services and perpetuates adversity throughout the community.
Bringing in diverse lived experience helps to bring about this change because we know that healing takes place in the context of healthy relationships over time. In addition to this report, we have been leading work alongside the International Transformational Resilience Coalition and other [00:27:00] partners that you can see on this screen to build population level resilience using a public health approach to the impacts of disasters, namely the climate, ecological, and biodiversity catastrophe that our society is facing that continues to generate stress and adversity throughout our society.
This work is based on decades of research done by Bob Doppelt around the ecological crisis, which he has published books about if you are interested. And you can also find more in our report on creating transformational resilience coordinating networks, which I believe a link to that is being shared in the chat now.
We will dive into the reasons why this is important and the strategies to build population level transformational resilience, which aligns well with CTIP's report that we just went over. I know that I have already shared a lot in this presentation, and discussing the climate crisis can be activating for many of us.
Understandably, I know it does for me. But I have also found it can be incredibly important as it brings [00:28:00] urgency to the community organizing work that we are doing. Many of us may have experienced an extreme weather event or disruptions to our normal ways of life, whether that be changes in the economy or the extreme of changing food and water supplies that threaten community well being.
And so what I'm about to share may elicit a lot of different feelings. And I encourage folks on the line to keep in mind that I am sharing this because there is hope. That we can work through what we are facing today. We know steps that can support the development of what we call transformational resilience, and the answers are embedded within community.
Before I jump into this next part, let's take a few breaths together. You can lower your gaze or close your eyes if you'd like. Whatever makes you feel comfortable. Perhaps softening your posture and ensuring you are comfortable and present. Or maybe you prefer to stand for a bit. Whatever your preference is.
My personal favorite breathing exercise that I come back to is one that I [00:29:00] call wave breathing, where we imagine that our inhales and exhales are traveling along the peaks and troughs of a wave. I find this comforting because it is motion that exists everywhere in nature, and it makes me feel connected to the world and universe around me.
So we inhale as we travel up the wave, And then start to slow our inhale as it gets over the peak, and then begin to exhale as we travel down the wave, slowing down as we reach the valley, and then begin to inhale again as we work our way toward another peak, and so on for as long as you need. If this breathing exercise isn't working for you, feel free to use another that you prefer, and we will take just a short moment together to breathe before we move forward.
Feel free to continue to do that for as long as you would like or need. What we need to know is that we are in a rapidly accelerating climate [00:30:00] ecosystem biodiversity catastrophe that will continue to increasingly affect every aspect of our society. It's not just an atmospheric climate issue. We call it a catastrophe not to catastrophize or just Build it up more than it is, though it's pretty huge, but to use the term as it is used in disaster sociology in disaster sociology, emergencies or short term events caused usually by a single factor that have a limited geographic scope and social consequences.
A disaster, in contrast, is a much larger and longer time frame with larger impacts, but they're still characterized as single events that end and give people time to recover. A catastrophe is defined as an event that has multiple interacting impacts that are very substantial and widespread, which build upon themselves and are cumulative and often have unforeseen surprising consequences.
So, consequently, they are far more complex, severe, and prolonged than an emergency or [00:31:00] disaster. And most importantly, we can't respond to a catastrophe in the same way or try to manage a catastrophe in the same way that we would an emergency or disaster because they are more complicated, severe, widespread, and unforeseen.
Cumulative and prolonged. But what we've been doing mostly so far where there is work being done to prepare people for what's coming at all is to use approaches we've used in the past to prepare for emergencies and disasters. That is single events that end and give people time to recover. But the climate ecosystem biodiversity catastrophe is clearly a catastrophe that requires a different form of response.
If we leave this unaddressed if we do not respond differently, we're going to see an epidemic of mental health problems or traumas around the world. We are already seeing this. So what we really need to do is proactively build population level transformational resilience, not just treat individuals who show symptoms of [00:32:00] pathology after they've been traumatized or react to the next disaster.
Or hope that enhancing external physical resilience is going to be sufficient. All of that is important and will remain important, but we've got to do much more. The ability to work across all of our relationships also was reaffirmed by a statement by the noted clinical psychologist, Dr. George Albee, who once said, no epidemic has ever been resolved by paying attention to the treatment of the affected individual.
Now, this is a clinical psychologist, not a physical health person, so we're not just talking about something like COVID here. He was talking about mental health and human service issues, and we still shouldn't just focus on the individual alone. This underscores the need to expand our approach beyond just individual services to prioritize a public health approach to mental wellness and transformational resilience.
So what does this mean? A public health approach to mental wellness and transformational resilience takes a population level approach, just like any public health approach [00:33:00] does, not merely focusing on individuals with symptoms of pathology or high risk groups, though they must be included using proportionate universalism and life course approaches.
Our mantra has got to be to leave no one behind. Everybody is going to be involved with this. The focus must be on preventing problems before they emerge, not just reacting to or treating them afterward. And many of the programs and initiatives we've seen integrate group and community minded healing methods, often run by peers, is in the prevention strategy.
So we always have to remember that prevention is the cure. A public health approach to mental wellness and resilience achieves this by strengthening protective factors, social support networks, resilience skills, habits, local resources and services that build and sustain healthy thinking and behavior.
Again, not just fixing deficits or treating individuals with symptoms of pathology. So we must build strength, social connections and [00:34:00] resources. And this is very different than what we are traditionally taught to do. Research shows us that we can do this. We know ways to build mental wellness and transformational resilience, and you will find that it is complimentary to the community change models report that we presented on earlier.
We can do this work in the most effective way is to establish horizontal social infrastructure and communities, connections across the community, not just the normal top down work that is done by the community. But to build a horizontal social infrastructure that can be called a resilience coordinating network.
The idea is that it engages a broad, diverse array of local grassroots neighborhood, voluntary leaders, civic groups, nonprofit, private, and public organizations who come together and plan and implement multisystemic strategies, meaning strategies to address all of those issues we've talked about. All those stressors that strengthen the capacity for [00:35:00] mental wellness and resilience across an entire population.
Here is an example of what a resilience coordinating network can look like. It's a really a well coordinated decentralization, which we know the power of decentralizing power and democratic principles are important in trauma informed approaches. And using a ring team or hub and spoke approach can help to operationalize this.
Inside you see a variety of groups across a community. These are just example and there are many others and each network is going to look different. They might elect different co chairs in an executive committee to help lead and steer the ship. Some may have funding to hire staff from the beginning.
Others may not. Outside of just these teams, there's also what we call resilience innovation teams that are working with different populations. Again, you can see examples along the outside border. They're doing their own work, developing their own strategies, and then within the [00:36:00] populations they work with, but they come back and stay coordinated with this broader group.
They share strategies, they get feedback on it. There are many examples of the importance of this. This kind of approach can also be really helpful to coordinate fundraising efforts. So we've got to collaborate in new and expanded ways to respond to the climate crisis. And the ring team approach, the well coordinated decentralization that you could call a resilience coordinating network is really a key way to do that.
So why do we need to do this? Why is it so important? There are six common phases of a disaster. On the far left, you see, we often have a warning, though sometimes we do not, of a disaster coming our way. When the impact comes, or series of events, and if they are great enough, they can traumatize 20 40 percent of the people who are directly impacted, as well as an additional 10 20 percent of others, emergency responders, people who know [00:37:00] those who are impacted, etc.
And then it goes into the heroic phase. The impacts are happening and people who don't know others step forward and put their lives on the line to help others during and right after a disaster. Then it usually goes into the community cohesion phase, which we can call the honeymoon phase, where community members come together.
They may not know each other and sometimes they may not even generally want to work with the other people that they haven't met. But they come together for a period of time and provide food, shelter, water, social support, emotional support, and the like. That reality is vital. And we often see that, but then the community cohesion phase ends after some period of time because we need to return to our lives as normal.
So that ends, and then that's when the disillusionment phase can take over, and this can last
months or even years. And that's where most of the mental health problems will emerge because people become on their own. Some people stay dysregulated for a long [00:38:00] time, though most eventually start to recover, assuming that there are no other disasters or relentless stresses that they experience.
The ongoing nature of the catastrophe is going to make that much more difficult. So why do we need resilience coordinating networks? Because the climate ecosystem biodiversity catastrophe is going to continue and actually exist. Accelerate for decades. Most mental health problems surface months or later after those direct impacts occur in that disillusionment phase.
So we need to build the horizontal social infrastructure in neighborhoods and communities to sustain the community cohesion phase over the long term. That's what we're really trying to do, not just let people go out on their own and experience those issues, but to do this together. The ITRC work kicked off with an extensive research project that took about two and a half years looking all over the world for ideas on how to prevent and heal mental health [00:39:00] problems generated by widespread relentless adversities.
And they found out that there were several. What we would call it in the Western world is the public health approach that is most effective. They found five key areas that are going to be specifically needed for the climate emergency, and by far the most important is to build strong and weak social connections throughout the community.
By strong, I'm talking about people who you know, friends, families, and neighbors who you share your life with in some way. By weak, I mean people who you don't share personal things with, but you're still connected with in some ways. And you can call it bonding, bridging, and linking social support networks.
Building social connections is vital to address the toxic social isolation and loneliness that is generating profound mental health problems today. But true connections have been found to be far more important than first responders during the first three to five days and often much longer for many disasters.
This [00:40:00] is not to minimize the critical work that first responders do, but is to highlight the importance of strengthening social support networks within communities. And social connections are especially important in a crisis, even more so during a catastrophe, like we are experiencing now, because they provide the emotional and practical support needed for resilience and well being.
When people engage in this kind of work, some people find meaning and purpose in their lives by assisting others in some way. So building those social connections often gives people a new sense of meaning and purpose and hope by going out and assisting others. The second core foundational area is to ensure a just transition by actively engaging residents in creating zero emission, climate resilient, physical, built, economic and ecological conditions, locally owned and operated businesses, healthy and safe public spaces, and more.
Parks, equitable transportation, [00:41:00] healthy forest and ecological systems, healthy and ample housing, et cetera, is all critical. We may not usually think of this as our job in the mental health and human services world, but it is. And we need to avoid that siloing because Unhealthy local conditions create mental health problems, but we have seen in many community organizations doing this work, that active engagement in creating healthier local conditions from the bottom up enhances hope, which builds resilience and adaptability.
We have actually seen people increase their senses of hope and therefore mental well being by engaging them in this kind of work. At the same time, while integrating external physical resilience with human social, physical, and emotional resilience, what we mostly focus on is trying to harden physical infrastructure in our communities.
That's called climate adaptation in many cases, and that's usually completely disconnected from this work, but it has to be connected. At the same time, [00:42:00] reducing local emissions, strengthening physical adaptation, and other ways, when you engage residents in that, you create the political pressure for change and create active senses of engagement that create conditions of empowerment that can also support transformational resilience.
We want to emphasize here that there is no community without human, there is no community resilience without human, social, psychological, and emotional resilience. We cannot just focus on external physical resilience. Actions to reduce actions to reduce emissions, regenerate, restore ecosystems, strengthen physical resilience, is going to have limited effects unless they are fully integrated into efforts that build population level, mental wellness, and transformational resilience.
At the same time, disaster preparedness and response and disaster mental health and other human services are going to be much more effective when they're integrated into these community led Resilience building initiatives. [00:43:00] The third foundational area is to really build universal literacy about mental health and transformational resilience.
This feeds off of health literacy and what the research shows that people are very health literate and literate about mental well being and resilience. Are very low, but you want to build that by helping everyone become trauma informed, helping everyone understand how trauma and toxic stress can affect their mind, body, emotions, and behavior, and then learn presencing and purposing skills, which are self regulation and adversity based growth skills.
This helps people understand what is happening within them and around them, which can normalize their struggles and reduce their fears of being stigmatized. And as a result, they are less likely to do the same to others because they can relate to the experience supporting the development of compassion and empathy.
And while it also builds the knowledge and skills needed to prevent and heal their own mental health struggles, it can motivate some [00:44:00] people to find new meaning and purpose and hope in life by helping others become trauma and resilience informed. We find that to be the case often. The fourth area is to help residents regularly engage in specific practices that enhance mental well being.
Laughing often, practicing forgiveness and gratitude, which can be difficult during stressful times, are still important to do when and as often as we are able to. Active engagement in these activities and building community cohesion releases trauma from the nervous system, which helps prevent mental health issues and heal them, while it also helps build social connection.
And offers experiences that can create emotional states that bring people meaning in life and motivate some people to get involved to find new meaning and purpose in their lives by helping others. And finally, the fifth area is to establish mostly peer led group and mind community minded opportunities to heal.
Even when people are engaged in [00:45:00] these activities, many times because of the climate emergency getting worse, they can be traumatized. So we Really have to offer these on an ongoing basis. There are many different kinds that can that can support and many that may be more appropriate or possible from community to community.
These healing methods normalize struggles and help people eliminate fears of being stigmatized while also allowing people to hear how others view the struggles and how they're approaching healing. And it builds the emotional safety nets that allow for people to release their traumas and heal and remain resilient and adaptable while also motivating some to find meaning and purpose in their lives or new meaning and purpose by connecting in new ways and perhaps being trained as peer facilitators in these efforts.
These five areas are all interactive. Each community group is different, and each community network starts at a different place, wherever they may feel it makes sense in their community and [00:46:00] does it in their own unique way. So while for the purposes of this presentation they were read linearly, it doesn't really happen that way in practice.
If you're interested in learning more, you can find videos and resources on our Climate COP webpage. We will be doing another community of practice with a full curriculum to promote this work, and are creating a commissioning program to support communities in engaging in these processes. We are going to launch that via webinar on October 1st at 12 p.
m. Eastern time, and if you would like to join that, a team member should have just put a link in the chat to register for that. We have been talking a lot about the practice of building community, and while we showed how these policies in the past have successfully influenced such practices, I want to take some time to highlight two policies that have been introduced in this Congress that promote cross sector community coalitions.
Thank you Section 101 of RISE creates a new grant program to fund community [00:47:00] coalitions to address trauma with a price tag in the current bill of 4. 8 billion over eight years or 600 million per year. Beyond just this program, as you can see on this slide, there are a number of other important provisions in this bill that would support trauma informed approaches.
The Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act creates a smaller grant program to promote public health approaches to building population level mental wellness and resilience. The ITRC, whom we work with on the climate COP work I just discussed, played a major role along champions in Congress in shaping the bill's language.
So it should not be a surprise that it looks very similar to what we just discussed. This legislation does not necessitate working within our climate community of practice or benefit us or the I R I T R C in any direct way, other than promoting our mission and vision, which is what drives our work. The funding goes to [00:48:00] communities to support their work.
As with all of our programming, the community of practice and accompanying resources are provided at no cost. What both of these bills do is build capacity within communities to organize around trauma informed and healing centered approaches, and we will continue to work with growing numbers of advocates and offices to get this passed.
We will work from there to support communities as best we can. As has been our vision for a long time, the power of a national organization promoting trauma informed care only matters insofar as those practices are embedded within the community fabric all across the country, and we hope someday all around the world.
It is where the work must be done, and this is the type of work that must be done. I believe that links are being put in the chat. For you to reach out to your members of Congress to advocate for these bills now, and I encourage for you to be ready for our widespread mobilization in support of these [00:49:00] policies in the new year and the new Congress ahead.
In addition to advocating for these yourself, please also share them with your networks and others in your community to put healthy pressure on our elected officials to get these bills passed. What we must recognize in a world that frequently works to treat problems we face with a prescribed medication or treatment, that so many of the deepest problems we face in this world, we must get through together.
We need each other to heal. It is through community. Which can be defined in a variety of ways from geographic to identity based or otherwise, that we will find our ways out of the issues that our society faces today. The principles shared today are hopefully helpful in some ways as you all move forward to build community capacity, to work to promote healing and transformational resilience.
I know that it is not easy. The work I do today is informed by the work that I did in Philadelphia communities at the beginning of my career. [00:50:00] One initiative in particular, LOVE, run out of the community center at which I worked, specifically worked to develop a trauma informed community coalition to To address the deeper issues our communities faced beyond the child care, teen programs, workforce, development and emergency services that the community center itself normally provided.
What I shared today is in no way meant to portray that this work is supposed to be simple. These interconnected steps are never truly over. We are just constantly working toward better and learning along the way. But I do believe that it is some of the most critical work and rewarding work that I have ever had the pleasure of doing thus far in my career.
And I know members of the thousands of coalitions that do work along these lines feel similarly. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the work that you do to support each other, to support the communities that you live in, as we work together to make our world a better place.
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