Tarpon Springs, FL, once known for harboring the nation’s largest sponge-harvesting industry, today boasts a new designation: it may be the first city in the country to declare itself a trauma-informed community.
It isn’t that the 24,000 residents of the scenic Gulf Coast community know more than the rest of us about emergency room techniques, spend their time crunching spreadsheets of violence data, or watch more episodes of “America’s Most Wanted”.
It means that the community has made a commitment to look at everything it does – education, juvenile
justice, welfare, housing, medical practices, business practices, etc. -- through a trauma-informed lens. A key element of the initiatives's success lies with the community members engaging as partners, one by one.
The goal, you might have guessed, is less trauma -- immediate and generational. So far, the initiative has produced some surprisingly down-to-earth shifts in how people live their lives:
- Staff members at a local elementary school are asking different questions about why students are having difficulty learning. As a result, they’re working with the rest of the community to do hearing and vision exams, give out eyeglasses, arrange a weekend snack and meals program, set up a uniform bank with the support of a local church, and provide students transportation to extracurricular activities.
- The local housing authority is setting up trauma-awareness training program called: “Why Are You Yelling at Me When I'm Only Trying to Help You?”
- A 68-year-old resident, who had severe childhood trauma, joined the initiative’s social marketing committee. She volunteered to attend the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma in San Diego last September. That profound experience led her to review her life year by year…and knit 68 caps for premature infants while she ruminated. She did a public presentation about the conference, donated the caps to a local hospital and foster care center, and is emerging as a local trauma prevention champion.
These are just small steps, notes local artist Robin Saenger. The project’s too young to produce big results yet. “But this is a long-term initiative. There’s not an end date to this. When everybody’s participating, there will be a cumulative impact.”
Saenger, who was Tarpon Springs’ vice-mayor from 2005 to 2011, developed the idea for the initiative in the middle of 2010, when she realized that many of the issues facing her city -- including homelessness, domestic violence and substance abuse -- stemmed from exposure to violence. She talked with her good friend, Dr. Andrea Blanch – a senior consultant at the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care -- about the cultural shift required to create a more peaceful community.
“She listened,” says Saenger, “and then said: ‘You’re talking about a trauma-informed community.’” And Peace4Tarpon was born.
[Photo at beginning of this post shows Dr. Andrea Blanch, left, and former vice-mayor of Tarpon Springs, Robin Saenger, right.)
Read the rest of this post at the ACEsTooHigh.com news site. (Here is the city's 2pgMEMORANDUM_OF_UNDERSTANDING.pdf.)
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