WANDA BOONE: A RESILIENCE RAINMAKER
Wanda Boone, executive director of a North Carolina nonprofit, Together for Resilient Youth (TRY), to combat youth and adult substance use, not only raised three children of her own but also fostered seven children with mental health and substance use challenges. Despite – or perhaps because – of her own high ACEs score, Boone said that early on she decided “my main goal in life was to be a fantastic wife and mother.”
She’s exceeded her goal in many ways. Raised in Teaneck, NJ, she says her parents were “professionals, although ahead of their time in their achievements, who were not able to be the kind of parents one would want or deserve.” As a young child, sandwiched between two brothers, “my desire was to love children and to have the kind of family I did not have.”
While a teenager, New Jersey youth were asked in a competition sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews to write papers about achieving racial harmony in response to the Newark1967 riots. Boone’s paper won. She recounts, “What was supposed to be a summer weekend program turned into meetings across the state where dignitaries like (U.S. Representative) Adam Clayton Powell spoke to us about civil rights.”
In college, she started to major in French, an interest that grew out of hearing tales from her friends about summer vacations and homes in southern France. As an African American, she said she didn’t encounter racism where she grew up. In fact, Teaneck was the first town in the U.S. to voluntarily vote against segregated schools.
First Black Person in the Lab and Out of the Kitchen
Instead of pursuing French, however, Boone attended the Englewood School of Nursing in NJ to earn an RN, and then took courses at Duke University to train as a medical technologist. From 1973 to 1976, she worked in the emergency lab there and then later was hired by Dr. Charles Roe as a research specialist working on myocardial infarction at Duke University’s Medical Center’s Division of Pediatric Metabolism.
Of her experience upon arriving at Duke in Durham, NC, Boone says, “I was the first Black person to work outside of the kitchen in an eye, ear, and nose hospital. I was the first Black person to work as a senior research specialist at Duke, only because Dr. Roe was more concerned with my talents than with my race. He put his career on the line to advocate for me.”
After returning from three years in California, where she experienced three earthquakes, she returned to NC to work with Dr. Roe as a senior research specialist, this time to diagnose babies born with metabolic disorders like Reye’s syndrome. Dr. Roe had introduced a noninvasive diagnostic tool for Reye’s and similar disorders using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, or GCMS.
GCMS technology was also used for drug testing as well as clinical trials, so she was able to transfer her knowledge and skills to a private company in Research Triangle Park, based in NC and one of the largest research centers in North America.
Being the first and only African American senior executive in the company, she was responsible for overseeing quality assurance and regulatory affairs in drug-testing clinical trials.
“I excelled at my job. I experienced the trauma of racism every day. I was the first African American to work in senior management in the company. Although I worked at this company for 20 years, they did not want me in that position. But because I positively impacted their bottom line, they didn’t want to get rid of me.”
The Turning Point
Boone’s employer did drug testing. She helped to write regulations pertain to drug use for the Department of Transportation as well as legislative requirements for instant drug tests used today.
While at the job, “I kept seeing all the positive drug results from everywhere. More and more teenagers were not getting jobs because of positive drug tests. I asked if more could be done to advocate for prevention. That was the end of my tenure.”
While working full time, Boone and her husband, an education professional, had been raising their own three children while taking in therapeutic foster children, anywhere from ten to 15 years old, and successfully parenting them until they were able to return to their families or leave home when they turned 18. One remained with them from age 15 to 25.
“What I began to realize is that we were very successful as therapeutic foster parents. We didn’t understand there was a magic sauce to what we were doing. If you love children and set boundaries, they will be OK. “
In 2003, she and her husband started Together for Resilient Youth (TRY) to help reduce substance abuse issues in children. “Everything we did was on a volunteer basis,” and without any funding until 2012; in the interim, the couple was able to partner with community organizations and businesses to focus on what they now call Transformative Prevention.
Boone has also reached thousands around the world as well as locally as a keynote speaker and presenter about trauma, resilience, and preventing drug abuse in live workshops and online webinars in schools, juvenile justice centers, and the community. “No venue is too large or too small.”
ACEs Awareness
It wasn’t until 2013 that Boone “happened to see something about the ACE survey (CDC- Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study). That’s when I found out my score was 9.”
She continues, “I started to think about my parents and realized that they had high ACEs. I was able to survive because I was able to forgive them for the things that they did and spend the rest of my life dedicated to informing everyone about ACEs, and particularly resilience.”
A “resilience rainmaker,” Boone took a further step, and in 2017-18, asked Anne Derouin and Rosa Gonzalez-Guarda, both associate professors at Duke University School of Nursing, about creating a toolkit for resilience based on ACEs. The toolkit – and research paper coming out soon subtitled “Achieving Health Hand-in-Hand,” will help people find their path to resilience through self-care and identifying behaviors and thoughts for healing.
In the many workshops to develop the toolkit, which included diverse ethnic youth from low-wealth communities (built neighborhoods), she says, “We came to the conclusion we are not as different as we might have thought we were.”
“These children – 25 in one group – were reminded, It’s not your fault that adults might not have been watching and caring.” She adds, “I tell everyone they could regain their childhood.”
The Future
Despite the pandemic, Boone is still doing presentations, although now they are held online. She adds that ACEs include more than the childhood traumas identified in the original Kaiser Permanente-CDC study. “The new ACEs framework includes climate change (and COVID), adverse community experiences, and atrocious cultural experiences that have to do with the racism I experienced,” she explains.
And as for the foster children the Boones raised, their outcomes have demonstrated the power of ACEs-informed parenting practices. Three children—ages 5, 11, and 12—had seen their mother shoot and kill their abusive stepfather. Now, as adults, the oldest child is a professor; the middle child works in law enforcement; and the youngest has her own catering service and travel agency.
“There wasn’t a guidebook to tell us what to do,” says Boone, who has achieved her early childhood goal of becoming a “fantastic wife and mother”. Now it is her hope that TRY, which is expanding to the rest of North Carolina and beyond, as well as the “Achieving Health Hand-in-Hand” toolkit, will guide families, children, and communities to lead resilient lives.
To get a copy of the “Achieving Health Hand-in-Hand” toolkit for resilience, email ncahhh@aol.com.
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