My mother went into teaching after receiving her bachelors degree at Rutgers University in Camden in 1975. At the time I was a senior at Holy High School in Delran N.J., and remember Camden having its share of poverty, but on this day as I drive through Camden, a city now often ranked among one of the most dangerous places in America, a city where drug and alcohol abuse is widespread and more than half of all children living in Camden live below the poverty line, I feel devastated by the poverty, desolation, and hopelessness I’m witness to.
Full of apprehension and unease due to the sense of danger instilled in me as I’ve listened to people's views of Camden, I pull into a parking spot across the street from 543 State Street, the home of Hopeworks. Fortunately, I’ve arrived on time for my scheduled appointment, and after ringing the doorbell at what I later learn is the C.R.I.B, I’m taken a couple of doors down to the training center. [To learn more about the C.R.I.B go to --- http://www.hopeworks.org/crib/]
Upon arriving at the training center I’m introduced to my tour guide, Jose, who informs me that all web and Salesforce interns at Hopeworks are required to give a tour as part of their training, today happened to be his lucky day.
Awards line the walls of the entrance that leads into the first floor training room and Jose warmly introduces me to Anne Pushkal, training director at the center. Anne and Jose informed me that the trainees begin with basic computer skills, then move on to advanced HTML, PhotoShop and ImageReady. Once they’ve completed the Hopeworks curriculum, Hope Through School trainees have several job opportunities available to them.
Some trainees enter into web production and produce web sites for paying clients. Other trainees enter into the GIS program, where they create maps for clients. Other trainees become HTS trainers, assisting newer youth through the curriculum. In addition, every youth in the program meets with Daniel, the literacy director, at least once a week to work on their schoolwork. To learn more about the training programs go to --- http://www.hopeworks.org/programs/
On the way to the second floor where GIS, Salesforce, and the conference room are located, we pass a couple of interns as they put the final layer of frosting on a cake that they’ve made in preparation for a special celebration being held that evening. Every morning in the conference room, everyone meets and goes through a process called “The Huddle.” Jose explains that it is one of the tools derived from the Sanctuary Model, an opportunity for everyone to check in, access how they are feeling, and based on those feelings, make a commitment/choice on what they want to accomplish and do about what they’ve identified. I’m later to learn from Father Jeff, director of Hopeworks, that these type of tools are part of the organization's foundation because they provide the youth with the skills to make healthy choices.
On the third floor, we visit the offices of the development director and the formation director. Jose says they've been helping him develop into the man he is becoming, not only by engaging him in activities and curriculum that have helped him develop his leadership and work skills, but also by aiding him in understanding how his history has influenced his choices and presenting him with tools that help him make choices that enhance his life and the lives of others.
My tour with Jose ends back at the C.R.I.B where he is a resident and we go upstairs to meet Father Jeff Putthoff, SJ.
“Our vision at Hopeworks used to be 'Creating a safe pathway so that people could have dreams.' The Sanctuary Model and becoming ACE informed has transformed our vision to 'Creating a safe pathway so that people can learn their history and have choices for a future,'” says Father Jeff.
He tells me that Hopeworks has seen many youth getting into school getting a job and doing well, but they also saw many youth getting into school, getting a job and blowing it up. So as the program evolved he began to ask the following questions: Why are some of our youth blowing it up? Why aren’t they going to school? What’s wrong with them? Why is there so much injustice? Why? Why? Why?
“Organizations like ours who are working at helping people, who stand in opposition to that which harms people, have to understand that trauma informed care is about the healing of people who have been harmed---many, many, harmed from injustice in our world,” says Father Jeff.
"Now we know that we need to ask a different question,” he says. "The question we need to ask -- What happened to you? Right? When we ask that question of the youth, we help them realize the pattern, the dynamic that they have, which is what they carry into the school or the job or throughout their lives and engagements. If we can help them understand that what happened to them, how their history has caused them to develop adaptive skills, help them to understand that those skills helped them to survive and get through their experiences, but that they are now also using those same skills in these new places, and these new places are not connected to what happened to them, that's powerful isn’t it?”
We go on to talk about - the importance of learning your history and how being an effective service provider/organization depends on asking the question. Can you be an organization that can tolerate or, even more importantly, welcome re-enactment as an opportunity for growth? He and the staff at Hopeworks want it to be a place where re-enactment is embraced as the space for healing to begin. Father Jeff’s experiences have led him to believe that you can’t have healing if you can’t talk about your injury. In a sense you have to come in injured and then we can start.
”We began to be aware of this about four years ago, when all of a sudden I found that people on the staff were all stressed out and we were not liking youth," he says. “We were like: Oh my God! You’ve been late three times this month! Come back in a month when you are ready to take advantage of this great program!"
Father Jeff laughs as he shares this recollection. He tells me that he’s able to laugh at it now but discloses that the memory dredges up an experience that was really very painful at the time. Hearing the staff say things such as, “We are stressed, we’re working too much, we need double the staff, we need to work half as much!” At the same time being aware that at the time Hopeworks was serving only 50 percent of the people it could.
So he began to ask questions and the questions initially led them to motivational interviewing, which he says helped them get really inquisitive about people's behavior. That inquisitiveness led them to the Sanctuary Model, which incorporates an ACEs- and trauma-informed approach to healing and revitalizing organizations..
Father Jeff is a calm, deeply committed and passionate man with a lot of wisdom to share. “What you realize is that if you're in a place like Camden, it’s really stressed out because of the poverty and the violence. Like today, a block away they found a body and I’m riding my bike and I come across the police scene with the yellow tape and the medical examiner is going in. They found a man beaten to death a block away. We got volunteers here working in the garden and right next to the garden there’s a homicide. If there were homicides in every corner then that would be okay because then you know. Right? What’s really hard is when you don’t know, so you have to always have to be amped up all the time because you never know when it’s going to happen. You're not sure if it’s going to get you, so when you're working in that environment it’s like working around Chernobyl. So when you come to Camden -- whether you’re a good person or bad person, or you want to do service, or whatever -- if you come here, you're going to get irradiated. Right? The people, they are having to live half-cocked, hyper-aroused lives to survive and you’re an organization working in the midst of it and if you don’t take steps to equip yourself with the tools to deal with the effects of radiation, you're going to start acting like the people you are supposed to be taking care of.”
What he has identified and has come to understand is that this was happening at Hopeworks. It’s called vicarious trauma. It’s natural, he says, that in an environment like Camden, organizations, family units, and people begin to act traumatized. Adding to the mix from what we now know from the research about childhood adversity, people who work in these environments tend to have higher ACE scores. “So people who work here bring their own plutonium to the party," says Father Jeff. "They show up and it’s like this is reactor city and we get to see some of the effects of those combustible elements, such as poor attendance/ absenteeism. They start not liking the people they’re supposed to be working with, so the students, clients, or patients, they’re the problem."
"The Sanctuary Model is all about creating a healthy community so that one can be really attentive to what has happened and how our history is really present here," he continues. "So in working with people that have been traumatized, we come to understand that what’s happened to them is not a memory. The way I think about it it’s more like a ghost, it’s alive with the person, so when your interacting with that person, their history is alive right there. It’s not a scrap book that they pull out and say, 'Oh yeah this was really hard.' Instead, it’s happening right there when you're talking to them. Hopeworks is trying to become an organization where not just the staff but the youth themselves can actually be aware of the fact that the real power is when people themselves become aware of what’s happened and the impact it’s had on their lives."
He says that my guide, Jose, has come to realize that in time of stress he gets physically ill. “Jose knows he’s always sick," Father Jeff explains. "What he hasn’t known and what he’s beginning to appreciate is that the sickness served a purpose, getting sick was helpful to him and if that’s the case, rather than to be reactive, he now might have some choices, he might find other ways that are more effective in dealing with the world.”
We go on to discuss the concepts of safety and trauma. Father Jeff says that he believes that when people feel unsafe they have to regulate themselves in order to stay in touch with their future. Because if they start to re-enact they loose touch with their future, so future becomes fantasy. “One can’t say that these dreams are not possible but they demand a great deal of work, perseverance, and life skills.”
“What’s powerful about Sanctuary is that it gives us the tools to meet our mission and vision,” says Father Jeff. “Our desire is for people to be safe and we want them to have safety, so that they can actually be disturbed. The youth are getting really good at saying, 'I feel unsafe; you make me feel unsafe.' What we are working on is encouraging them to feel angry, feel upset. We tell them we want you to have your feelings, but we want you to learn to have them without having a re-enactment. The reality is that you can be pissed off and angry as you want, but I’m not your dad, or even more importantly, you are pissed off and I remind you of your dad, but I’m not your dad."
"One of the Sanctuary tools that we give them when they acknowledge and begin to deal with that realization is a safety plan, which we all carry around for self-regulation throughout the day. Each plan is specific to that person's needs, to help that person with real detailed things that they have to do," he says. "My plan is T.I.P.S.E – Time, intrigue, prayer, sleep, and exercise. In my room at home is my favorite chair. If I go for a week and don’t have my prayer time, not good, and to be around a nuclear reactor is going to be really hard."
He tells me that the safety plan is a simple tool that leads to one's ability to self regulate. It allows one to be able to bestow themselves with self care. “It’s universal precaution, so that I can be around Chernobyl," he says. "If I’m around Chernobyl and I don’t realize I’m being irradiated and my hair starts falling out, I start to blame you because radiation is invisible just like trauma. But if I have my safety plan, I learn to become more aware and present. The community begins to ask questions of itself - What does that remind you of? Do you have a safety plan when you start to feel like that? What do you need to do to take care of yourself? Sanctuary allows for real culture change that allows the space to engage in change, allows us to attend to the spaces."
Father Jeff tells me that Hopeworks takes work. It takes sweat. “Hope is sweat," he says. "It’s not something you just say, it’s the exercise. Trauma-informed care is an exercise. Safety is an exercise. If you do these things you will see things happen. It’s not magic. It’s also not a recipe. Let's take the analogy of a car engine and changing the oil every 500 miles. If I change the oil, my engine is going to run better. It doesn’t mean my engine will always run, but it will run better. And if something happens to it, my engine will be easier to fix.”
He feels that youth need to be encouraged to realize that they are really good at survival. The choices they made based on what’s happened to them have led to their survival. But in many cases even though the choices that they made are a result of what’s happened to them, the reality is that the choices they make today are the same choices that prevent them from succeeding. They are adaptive, unreflective, reactive choices to painful situations that used to help to get by but now impede their growth. So in a world that can feel so out of control because what’s happened to you, a world that taught you a certain way of being, you can, through hard work and sweat, access another way of being, access tools that allow you to self-regulate and work towards being the person you were meant to be.
Life is tough, says Father Jeff. “But isn’t it great that when bad things happen, you can emotionally manage it, as opposed to having that feeling overwhelm you because what happened to you is still alive in you.”
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