The Philadelphia Inquirer: The Game Changers, a group of young trauma survivors, heal themselves to help others

It had been a very long time since anyone told Nasir Lee that they respected him. A deeper kind of respect. Not the kind that is more like fear. Nasir, 20, had earned plenty of that on the streets of the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood where he grew up.

Thick-shouldered and reserved, almost guarded, but always polite, Nasir was the youngest and quietest member of the Community Health Worker Peer Project, a group of young black and Hispanic men who have suffered great trauma and who are now learning, in a course at Drexel University, to recognize and treat trauma in others.