Meeting Notes

August 9, 2016

Attending (See attached notes)

Welcome by Wendie Skala

Mindfulness Minute led by

Introductions and Celebrations led by Wendie Skala

Action Workgroups

Resilient Sacramento has five Action Workgroups. Workgroups include:

• Policy
• Trauma-Informed Schools
• Community Outreach & Engagement
• System Involved Youth
• Health Care and Behavioral Health

Since the last meeting:

Members of the Outreach group met: Wendie and Alicia have plans to present at the library staff development day, building on Alicia’s work to bring trauma informed practice to the Sacramento library system.

Imani spoke for the Policy group and their work on 5 pillars- moving beyond the textbook to the challenges to implementation at the provider level.

System-Involved Youth group met and identified their current priorities as a group. Their plan is to take inventory of what these systems do (juvenile justice and child welfare), and share their work so far on implementing trauma informed training. Each system is beginning to focus on cross-over youth between systems; there is already work to develop a protocol for these “dually-involved” youth to launch in October.

Health Care group has a growing membership, which will include 4 interns assigned to Wendie. She and Andres are interested in continuing to work to catch medical professionals early in their careers, while they are still students, and induct them into approaching their work from a trauma-informed lens. Discussion around health care prompted the perspective that another dimension of this work is targeting those that work with the high-utilizer (of medical & psychiatric services) population, such as veterans.

There is discussion around using the digital storytelling method as part of Resilient Sacramento work. DeAngelo and SVIP area already beginning a project to get youth experiencing violence in their communities to tell their stories of resilience.

Toni mentioned that perhaps people telling their stories as a form of healing can be an angle to introduce to StoryCorps. Kristina notes that we can consult the “Safe Place” curriculum to help people decide when to share their story.

Carolyn suggests that we consider creating an Action Group focused on the needs of veterans, an online category as well as an offline working group.

Presentation: Racing ACEs

DeAngelo, Imani and Donielle shared their experiences attending the Racing ACEs conference on August 4 & 5, hosted by RYSE and featuring Dr. Ken Hardy, a psychologist that consults on healing racial trauma.

DeAngelo helped plan the conference. He shared the guiding question that he took away from the conference: Less evidence based practice, more practice-based evidence. This resonated with his approach to his work at SVIP. Another take-away was the concept of Sacred Rage, which needs to be centered. To talk about racial justice is healing.

Donielle shared the RYSE pyramid, a document that centers the role of racism and other environmental/institutional factors clearly on the trauma map.

Imani discussed the emotional impact of having an authentic conversation about race, something that doesn’t happen often and therefore brought out a lot of unprocessed emotions. Experiencing racial injustice is directly painfully, in addition to the ways that racism causes pain through the consequences of poverty, and disparate impact outcomes across so many domains.

Opening this conversation led to important questions: What is needed to unify as one community? We must address this conversation. We have to create space for this conversation. We need everyone in all systems to have these conversations, not just the “choir”.

After the recap of the conference, the discussion opened up. Wendie asked, how do we integrate this conversation into everywhere we practice, library, health care, the schools, etc.

DeAngelo pointed out that we have to actively seek to open the space for this critical dialogue. It’s part of the overall work on being trauma informed, which we want to be successful because we are doing this work for the betterment of humankind.

A first time attendee offered: one part of the problem is how do you perceive the population you’re working with? What biases do you bring? How does that interfere with the intervention or help you want to offer? Sierra Health’s Community Assessment showed clear racial disparities in serving people’s health needs. But data is only part of the story. The full story is needed to be told in order to heal. Speaker: “My heart is heavy seeing my people suffer”.

She added that the conversation on Racing ACEs resonated with her and increased her interest in attending Resilient Sacramento. Due to this critical conversation, she is glad to have received and acted on the invitation to this meeting.

The work of two experts was suggested for those wanting to learn more and continue this dialogue:

• This blog post from Teryn Heckers includes the famous TED Talk by Nadine Burke Harris, as well as a link to the trailer for Resilience, which will be screened on November 1, 2016.

• Find out about Dr. Joy DeGruy on her website, as well as view recordings of her lectures:

http://joydegruy.com/resources...joy-lectures-videos/

Other News

Teryn updated the group on the plans for the November screening event for Resilient Sacramento. Nadine Burke Harris confirmed her availability for November 1. Other logistics are still being worked out. The goals of the event are: getting policy stakeholders to become informed about the work of Resilient Sacramento and its relevance to creating a healthy Sacramento community. Andres suggested that as we develop our theme for the discussion, propose to Nadine Burke Harris that her remarks address resilience in the context of racial justice.

Teryn also mentioned a goal to get medical staff trained on the social determinants of health. One obstacle is that the medical school curriculum isn’t very flexible, so there are limited opportunities to introduce new elements. One solution that UC Davis is planning, is to create recorded interviews with leaders on the topic of trauma informed practice, and make them easily accessible online. That way, medical students can get the information without waiting for the material to get embedded into the curriculum.

DeAngelo and Chris discussed a digital storytelling project. They are actively working with experienced documentarians to create a documentary about resilience in South Sacramento. The goal is to help counter the negative image of this neighborhood with other perspectives. This project is in its beginning stages, and they are open to ideas and are also seeking donations to cover the costs.

Announcements and Closing led by Wendie Skala

• September 6:  CSEC  is holding a resource fair at the Branch Center Road location, hosting agencies that will provide direct services to individuals experiencing human trafficking. (Niku/Sarah of CPS)

• The group Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) will be holding its first open meeting on August 24 at the Belle Coolidge Library (Molly of Mutual Assistance Network).

• Neighborhood Link will be hosting monthly meetings starting August 16, to discuss efforts to address African American Child Death Disparities in Sacramento County (Molly of Mutual Assistance Network)

• Please join us for our next meeting on September 13, 2016.