Rosa Ana Lozada grew up on a two-block-long street in a San Francisco neighborhood pocked with trauma: domestic violence, child abuse, the frequent wail of police sirens. “It was unsafe to walk the two blocks to the bus stop,” she recalled. “In my community, we learned that police officers were not our friends because they were only seen when bad things happened.”
For Lozada, now CEO of Harmonium, Inc., and a member of the San Diego Trauma Informed Guide Team, home and family were the counterweight to violence and fear. “I was raised with a family that loved us so abundantly. As I moved forward in my journey, I was determined that what people needed was a sense of respect, a sense of regard, and a sense of love.”
During a two-day convening of Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) grantees in November, stories like Lozada’s brought a focused hush to the room and underscored one of the gathering’s themes: Stories are essential to social movements, including the growing effort to combat early adversity and build resilience in communities across the nation.
“We’re emphasizing the power of stories,” said Leslie Lieberman, Director of Special Initiatives for The Health Federation of Philadelphia, as she welcomed leaders and team members from fourteen communities to a two-year learning collaborative coordinated by The Health Federation with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The California Endowment.
Lieberman referred to the work of Marshall Ganz, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, about the role of stories in creating social movements. Ganz has written that stories help us learn to exercise agency, develop personal and collective identities, and find the emotional and moral resources that enable us to act. “Social movements tell a new story,” he wrote in a 2001 paper. Again and again during the MARC gathering, participants told stories of their own childhood and adult struggles and breakthroughs, and of challenges and triumphs in their communities.
Some were origin stories that explained the genesis of a community’s work on ACEs and resilience. Trudy Townsend, coordinator of Creating Sanctuary in the Columbia River Gorge, described how a group of leaders from The Dalles, Oregon—the chief of police, the superintendent of schools, the district manager of health and human services—sat together in shared frustration about the state of their town and region. “We looked at the data and realized that after many years and many initiatives, we were making only incremental progress toward desired outcomes. We groused; we talked about the challenges of economics, the oppression some members of our community faced, and the culture in our community. “Then our new director of mental health said, ‘That all sounds like trauma.’ And we asked ourselves, ‘What if…?’”
Other stories linked personal events with community trauma. Kathryn Evans Madden, a member of the MARC advisory committee and veteran community organizer, described being out with friends in Kansas City, Missouri, when she heard an abrupt popping sound—30-40 rounds of gunfire ricocheting between two cars. “In the aftermath, I realized how traumatic that was. It stuck with me. I woke up, still in a haze, trying to understand what happened and why…I wanted to understand the roots of this pain that was happening in my state and my city—what condition had led us to a point where there was an exchange of gunfire in the street, and I wasn’t even able to find out the name of the person who was killed.”
Kyle Wark, Indigenous Researcher and Policy Analyst for the First Alaskans Institute and a member of the Alaska Resilience Initiative, described how hosting community dialogues can enable elders, younger adults and children to share stories and understand how the events of grandparents’ and parents’ lives percolate into the present. “It’s more effective than having someone at a podium lecturing to them,” he said. “The shortest distance between two people is a story.”
And Renée Boynton-Jarrett, a Boston pediatrician who helped create the Vital Village Community Engagement Network, told of a recent Vital Village meeting at which member John King, Jr., said, “We all have the same desire to feel heard, understood and listened to. Our stories, whether they’ve been heard, silenced or dismissed, are important to us.”
In discussion about evaluation with members of the Westat team, in round-table talks led by MARC advisors, and during lunchtime chats, participants encouraged each other to be mindful of how they tell the story of ACEs and resilience. Linda Chamberlain, an epidemiologist, founder of the Alaska Family Violence Prevention Project and a MARC advisor, said language matters: In some rural communities, she talks about “well-being” and “brain breaks” instead of “resilience” or “toxic stress.”
Christopher Blodgett, a MARC advisor, clinical psychologist and Washington State University faculty member, urged listeners at his round-table sessions to keep their ACE presentations to educators succinct, focused and suffused with hope. He advised “a crisp PowerPoint, with lots of storytelling: Here’s the challenge, here’s why it’s relevant to you, and here’s why there’s hope.”
At Melissa Merrick’s round-table talk, she reminded MARC participants that, in addressing childhood adversity and building resilience, they must revise a deep-seated—and damaging—story. “The dominant narrative in this country is still ‘us and them,’” said Merrick, a MARC advisor and behavioral scientist in the Division of Violence Prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We don’t have a shared vision for all children yet. We’re trying to learn how to put health equity in all the work we do. It’s embracing a new story: That my children will do better if all of our children do better.”
The message sank in. When MARC attendees added notes to a large poster asking how they would think and act differently as a result of the gathering, their resolves included: “I will use the power of story more to transform our community story…I will tell more stories.”
Ganz, the Harvard lecturer, describes three kinds of stories that shape social change: the Story of Self, the Story of Us and the Story of Now. “Each of us has a Story of Self—who we are, why we’re called to this work,” MARC project manager Clare Reidy told the group in closing. “Each of your communities has elevated a shared Story of Us. You are acting out the Story of Now. You are building a movement.”
Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) is a learning collaborative of 14 communities committed to building resilience and addressing childhood trauma through an explicit application of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) science, language, and data. MARC is coordinated by the Health Federation of Philadelphia with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The California Endowment. You can read more about MARC here.
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