On September 12-14 change agents from across the world came together for the 2018 Healing Justice Alliance Conference in Denver, Colorado. The conference had over 350 attendees and focused on violence intervention and prevention from multiple perspectives. The mission of the Healing Justice Alliance is: "To connect and support hospital-based, community-linked violence intervention and prevention programs and promote trauma-informed care for communities impacted by violence."
The conference this year focused on Historical Trauma: Treating the Symptom, Healing the Root. After a blessing from Grupo Tlaloc, pictured above, keynote speaker Dr. Joyce DeGruy took the stage. During her address DeGruy discussed the Holocaust and Japanese internment and how we look back at those historical events in awe and disbelief. We ask ourselves, "How could this have happened?" What we do not realize, she pointed out, is that we are in that exact same moment now as migrant families are being torn apart and locked away in detention. We are watching what is happening while trying to understand the complexity of trauma and violence in this very moment. We too will be questioned by future generations for allowing this atrocity to occur.
DeGruy went on to discuss the issues in our culture about discussing slavery noting, "You can't heal what you don't understand." With 339 years of slavery, we still do not have a way to openly and honestly speak about slavery in this country. How many generations have been affected by this trauma? How many continue to be affected? She discussed how this dissonance has become epigenetic, affecting the ways people of color and white people interact with each other. We have an epigenetics of white fear — white people being aware of the trauma that has been placed onto people of color and being scared that people of color will retaliate. This irrational fear has led us to mass incarceration. DeGruy later led a two-part session on post-traumatic slave syndrome.
Throughout the conference a healing space was provided so that attendees could decompress and regroup.
In another session, Mutual Healing: Collective Healing, Collective Liberation, presenters Richard Smith, the national director of HealingWorks at Common Justice; Dr. Bruce Purnell, executive director of The Love More Movement; and Lisa Good, director of Urban Grief, explored mutually supported healing spaces for men and women of color.
No member of a community heals in isolation, they said, and noted: Never is this truer than for communities that are forced, through shared oppression, to rely heavily on one another. They looked at the different paths of healing between different races and genders and asked the question, "How do we heal mutually?"
Good discussed her work in working with women who are supporting the men in their lives who are victims of violence. She said that women are put into the position of healing men after a violent incident, and that, many times, they have no voice or choice in this matter. If they are also a victim of violence, there is no place for them to share — and this becomes a dance with danger.
The panelists agreed that healing is not a competition and that healing is needed on both sides. The question to the session participants was, given these circumstances, how do we support survivors of violence, recognizing the varied needs of genders and people of color while also creating spaces for mutual healing? One solution is that mutual healing does not always mean healing in the same space. It means that "I see you" in the process and "I am healing too." Trauma is about not being seen while healing is about being seen.
Later, at a session entitled Community Resilience and Resistance for Peace: Healing and preventing historic and present day community trauma and violence, Lisa Parks, an associate program director at the Prevention Institute, shared the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience: Understanding, Addressing and Preventing Community Trauma framework. She discussed how naming and healing community trauma is an important step, but that we need to also name structural violence as a factor in community violence for healing to begin. She stressed that we need to look beyond youth and into the people and conditions in a community that are creating violence. In another session, Parks shared the THRIVE: Tool for Health & Resilience In Vulnerable Environments, which is "a framework for understanding how structural drivers, such as racism, play out at the community level in terms of the social-cultural, physical/built, and economic/ educational environments."
Later in the session, David Muhammad, program manager of the City of Milwaukee Office of Violence Prevention, shared the Blueprint for Peace that was developed by the city to address violence.
"The Blueprint for Peace is the first of its kind in Milwaukee dedicated to the prevention of multiple forms of violence," said Muhammad. "It establishes clear direction and a call to action for a public health approach to violence prevention that engages community residents and multiple sectors." The approach in the blueprint is to look at all of the factors that can cause instability and how that plays into violence, including housing, employment and transportation.
For the closing to the conference, Francisco "Cisco" Gallardo, the program director for GRASP (Gang Rescue and Support Project) and a Denver native, shared his story of trauma and triumph. He discussed how his programs embrace and support youth by providing them with hope, job skills and community. One of the questions posed to the audience was in regards to trauma-informed care. "So you know my trauma, now what?!"
As a first time attendee to this conference I was blown away by the sheer amount of love, support and community bursting from the conference walls. One would think that people working on the front lines in Hospital Based Intervention Programs (HVIP) and Cure Violence (CV) programs would be weary, tired and perhaps even broken. The level of intensity of these positions should be overwhelming. Having to lose clients, co-workers and team members to violence would break most people. I found that the opposite was true. There was an immense feeling of hope for the future and that we can turn the tide of violence through our programs, agencies and relationships with each other.
The conference also went further than any conference I have ever attended on naming structural and historical violence. Other than my experience with the RYSE Center's Trauma and Healing Learning Series, I have not seen any professional gathering have the courage to focus so intently on the cause and effect of structural violence on our communities. In doing so, the conference was honest and real, starting from the point that structural oppression, white privilege and white supremacy are a detriment to our communities, and confronting them can be a life and death matter. I believe more conferences would be well served by following this model.
I also thought long and hard about what Gallardo said in his closing remarks, "So you know my trauma, now what?!" For those of us striving to be trauma-informed in our work, how are we really applying this practice? Once we have seen another person and their trauma, how do we embrace them and support them in their healing? My experience has taught me that proximity, humility and holding space for each other is the way to create healing for ourselves and our communities. But often times this is difficult to integrate into our work settings. Our definitions of what it means to be a "trauma-informed" or "healing" organization differ radically because of our lived experiences and backgrounds. I am left thinking, how can we authentically do this work together?
The Healing Justice Alliance Conference is about people on the ground, in the thick of it. They are loving and supporting people whom our society wants to discard or lock up for life. Many of us do not have the opportunity to serve our communities in this capacity. How do we infuse the wisdom, spirit and intent of the violence prevention movement into our own organizations and the ACEs movement? The integration has already begun as HVIP programs integrate ACEs as part of their framework to better serve and work with clients. It is exciting and inspiring to see the positive effect of ACEs in this work. But how do we in turn, take wisdom from HVIP and CV programs?
I challenge each of you, if you do not know about violence prevention and intervention, please find a way to learn more. The wealth of information, generosity of spirit and immense wisdom of this work is bound to inspire you. You can find out in-depth information about the conference here. You can also visit the NNVIP website to find out more. We have so much to learn from each other and so much capacity to build together by sharing our movements.
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