Recently, the United States reached a sobering milestone. The COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 500,000 people, surpassing the number of US soldiers who died in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. The pandemic has closed schools, turned urban areas into ghost towns, and caused massive job loss, long food lines, more homelessness, and isolation for many shuttered indoors in response to orders by public health officials.
And 2020 also witnessed numerous instances of violence by police in response to peaceful protests against institutionalized racism after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aubry, and other Black people.
All of this compounded what Howard Pinderhughes called “adverse community events” that have long existed in communities of color, resulting in widespread community trauma among African Americans and other people of color.
“What we've come to understand over the last five to seven years is that normally our communities are the fabric and foundation of resiliency for individuals and families — but when faced with trauma, communities themselves can be traumatized,” he said.
Pinderhughes is the director of the doctoral program in sociology at the University of California at San Francisco, and an associate professor in the UCSF School of Nursing. He was speaking at a recent webinar on trauma-informed systems within local governments and how to support communities through the COVID-19 pandemic.
The other speakers at the event, sponsored by the Prevention Institute,included Zeke Cohen, a Baltimore city councilmember; Robin Saenger, the founding director of the ACEs initiative Peace4Tarpon; and Luis Aroche of Our Children, Our Families and the HEAL SF initiative. Guided by the speakers, participants divided into small groups to develop strategies to bring back to their communities. (Here is a link to the slides.)
The starting point, said Pinderhughes, is for systems to own up to the harm they have caused and be willing to make structural changes that promote healing for individuals and communities. That, he explained, is the essence of trauma-informed systems change.
“It's all about figuring out how do we acknowledge the harm, but also how to transform systems so that they actually promote well-being and promote health,” he said.
For agencies and institutions to move towards becoming healing communities, said Pinderhughes, they have to make sure that they take their cues from members of the community. In addition, he said, “Allow them to be the agents of their own change in their own communities.”
Unearth white supremacy embedded in public policy
Baltimore councilmember Zeke Cohen runs a non-profit called Intersection, which teaches youth how to be community organizers. In 2019, in his role as a councilmember, he introduced the Elijah Cummings Healing City Act, making Baltimore the first city in the nation to consider a bill for trauma-informed and trauma-responsive care. It became law in February 2020.
Cohen got his start as an educator, where he saw up close how the city had undermined communities of color. He was teaching “in two schools that lacked heat, air conditioning, or drinkable running water. I taught in neighborhoods that had been redlined — and where young people were disproportionately exposed to violence and other ACEs, largely through the way in which Baltimore has done public policy around white supremacy.”
Among Cohen’s examples of institutionalized racism were a 1910 ordinance that codified racial segregation in housing, and Baltimore’s local efforts in pushing forward the federal government’s “war on drugs,” which targeted Black people and resulted in their mass incarceration. (See this report by the Drug Policy Alliance.)
Cohen was inspired to introduce the Elijah Cummings Healing City Act after a school shooting that left the school and community horrified and traumatized. At a public hearing, adults in the room proposed installing metal detectors and bringing police into the school to guard the halls.
“The young people who came and testified at our hearing wanted nothing to do with either of those two solutions,” said Cohen. Instead, they pushed for prevention.
“Specifically, they named every adverse childhood experience in the book. They talked about the day-to-day experiences of being homeless and overly exposed to violence. They talked about what it’s like to have a family that struggles with substance use and addiction. And they talked about just being Black in a city that was one of the birthplaces of redlining and what that does to your psyche and well-being.”
The young people challenged the city council, Cohen said. “You spend so much time thinking about our police department and its budget — why don’t you spend a commensurate amount of energy thinking about the traumatic experiences that we endure every day?” he recalled them asking.
Cohen and his peers spent the next year listening to youth in libraries, recreation centers, laundromats and classrooms. The young people made it clear that they wanted to help develop policy around preventing trauma, and they wanted it to happen across agencies and not in silos.
Around the same time that they were wrapping up their year of meetings with young people, Cohen said, the late Elijah Cummings, then a member of Congress from Maryland, was holding the first congressional hearings on childhood trauma. Although it wasn’t widely known at the time, he was dying of cancer. “He said, I’m not going to be around much longer, but I need you to pick up this ball and carry it forward and figure this out for our city.”
Cohen and his staff then went to the historically Black colleges in Baltimore and held “healing days,” along with poetry panels, TED talks on healing, and free haircuts from local barbers and beauticians. A crowd from all those events marched together to the Frederick Douglass School, where the shooting had occurred, to hold a press conference on February 9, 2020. Mayor Bernard Young signed the legislation that day.
The Elijah Cummings Healing City Act:
- Created a citywide taskforce, including people from all walks of life, to develop a collective strategy to reduce trauma
- Called for training for every city agency to understand brain science around trauma, healing and how to respond to trauma
- Called on all city agencies to work with the taskforce to change policies and practices that retraumatize.
Using ACEs science to transform a community
When Robin Saenger became the vice mayor of Tarpon Springs, Florida, she saw that child welfare and social service agencies were working hard to make a difference.
“Across the board, folks were doing great work, but I didn’t see the results of reduced numbers of domestic violence or child abuse cases, and I started noticing that there was kind of a disconnect,” Saenger said.
Then she learned about the ACE Study that tied 10 types of childhood traumas, including witnessing or experiencing abuse, with chronic health conditions in adults. The higher the ACE score, the greater the risk for suicide attempts, drug and alcohol addiction, teen pregnancy and poor performance at school.
“A huge light bulb went off for me,” she said. “Now I get it. We’re not looking at the root cause, we’re looking at symptoms. We’re putting Band-Aids on symptoms!”
Saenger took her message to the city council and mayor in a presentation about ACEs science. She asked her peers in government to make Tarpon Springs a trauma-informed community. They agreed and that was the birth of Peace4Tarpon in 2010. Its mission is based on building resilience, connection and healing.
At first, Saenger assembled large agencies, “the big players in the community,” including the police department. But over time, people would move on or change positions. She soon realized she was missing the voices and input of people living in the community, residents who don’t move away.
One community member who became part of the group was a hairstylist who worked in the salon Saenger went to and knew about Peace4Tarpon. “She said, ‘Robin, people disclose [their trauma] to me in my chair all the time and I need to know what to say to them and how to respond.’” Now the hairstylist has created a makeshift information kiosk next to her chair and hands out Peace4Tarpon brochures to her clients.
Community members worked on developing messaging for Peace4Tarpon that they believed would resonate with the community. Examples include:
- Peace4Tarpon will offer what peace we can to help heal the pain of trauma
- Let’s build trust
- Let’s have real conversations
- There’s nothing wrong with you
- You’re not alone. We’re all in this together.
ACEs initiatives don’t need money, they need reliable city partners
Saenger said that Peace4Tarpon is unfunded, built on the energy of volunteers. “We think there’s enough money being spent on trauma and responses to trauma,” she said. “It’s a matter of using the money more wisely.”
One example was bringing direct services, such as free mental health counseling to address trauma, into a building that houses an after-school program. Children can access counseling on site, rather than needing their parents to transport them across town.
When the pandemic hit, everything shut down, and the group stopped meeting for months. Then a Peace4Tarpon board member suggested they have Zoom teas around different themes, and so far, they’ve held two, one on compassion and another on forgiveness. They’re now having monthly online meetings.
“The unintended consequence of this was to give folks who are homebound and isolated a place to connect with others,” Saenger said. (Peace4Tarpon’s model has been picked up by other communities in Florida and around the country.)
Match children with trusted adults
Luis Aroche is a project manager for Our Children, Our Families Council, launched in 2014, and HEAL SF, the trauma-informed intiative launched in San Francisco in April 2020 in response to the mass trauma perpetrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses specifically on frontline workers who have been hardest hit by the pandemic. And Aroche knows first-hand why it’s important to focus on healing frontline workers, including teachers.
Growing up, he recalled, “My home was right in the middle of a gang war zone. I remember walking into my 9th grade class on the first day of school and my body was filled with adrenaline, making me hypersensitive to my surroundings. My stomach growled from hunger. I wore an expression on my face that said ‘Don’t mess with me.’ My mom wasn’t in the best shape. She would drink a lot and hit me when she got drunk.
“Every morning my teacher, Miss Miranda, would ask me if I had eaten breakfast and would accompany me to the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal. I felt safe with her; she was always present.”
Aroche dropped out of school and spent years in juvenile detention. While there, he wrote letters to Miss Miranda. Later on, he asked her why she cared so much about him. She told him that despite his apparent rage, “‘I knew deep inside you were fragile and hurting; you needed me to be there for you.’ My teacher saved my life.”
In Aroche’s role with HEAL SF, he’s using this experience as a lens for surveying essential and frontline workers about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their lives and what they need from the city to heal.
“We need to take care of the Miss Mirandas in our community,” he said. “We need to take care of our basketball and football coaches, our case managers.”
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