A couple weeks ago, a WCCI intern, Brittney Craven, sat down (virtually) with Jennifer Warren, the Executive Director of Western Youth Network located in Boone, NC. She spoke with us on keeping hope, the importance of universal screening and early intervention, as well as, prevention. Below is the transcript of the conversation:
Brittney: Hello! This is Brittney Craven and I am joined today by Jennifer Warren. Thank you so much for joining me. Would you mind introducing yourself and explaining your various roles in the community?
Jennifer: Sure, well, as you said, I'm Jennifer Warren and I'm the executive director of the Western Youth Network and I'm also on the leadership team of the WCCI, which is our trauma and resilience collaborative in Watauga County.
Brittney: Would you share with us a bit about your background in trauma work?
Jennifer: I actually ended up getting a master's degree in counseling and graduated in 2013 from Appalachian State University. So I think that I kind of had a background in that from a counseling perspective and then even before that, we at Western Youth Network work with children who are under resourced, who have experienced a lot of adversity, and so I think I have known it from a couple different levels. Then in 2009 somebody kind of mentioned ACEs to me and said “have you heard about this? Here's an article” and I remember being very intrigued by it at the time. Then in 2015, I saw that Asheville, which is a city pretty close to Boone, was going to have a conference in ACEs and resilience. Even though my husband and I were just going to be getting back from a cross-country trip, I just thought “this has to happen, this speaks to me, I have to go to this” and there was a reason. That was a game changer. In fact, Dr. Anda, who was one of the first ones who did the ACE study, was a speaker at the conference. So I got really well steeped in ACEs and resilience and brought all that information back to Watauga County and from there in a conversation with Denise Presnell, one of our other leaders, our whole trauma and resilience initiative was born
Brittney: Yes and we are very grateful for you sharing that information. It's very powerful in the trauma field. So what led you to counseling if you don't mind me asking?
Jennifer: I think that I've always been a little bit unsure of what I wanted to do, not unlike a lot of people. I was an English major undergrad and I was a communications minor. Through my communications classes I took all sorts of career assessments and I think at the time it started to show that I should be working either as a counselor or at a YMCA or something like that, so something helping a non-profit profession. I ended up working at the Western Youth Network. I started there in 2002 and became the Executive Director in 2006 and I think when I became the Executive Director, I was very nervous about what I didn't know. All of a sudden, I was in a position of having to answer staff questions about very difficult cases with our children and I felt very inadequate to do so. So, I started researching what things were happening since we're fortunate enough to live in a university town with ASU right there. I started researching to see what was available and eventually ended up at clinical mental health counseling and then I had a concentration in marriage and family therapy. So I kind of got steeped in how these community agencies can work in a counseling capacity but then also learned a lot about the systems and holistic approach through my MFT concentration. So yeah, I think it was kind of just at one point in time a career assessment said I should be in the counseling field and then also combine that with this vulnerability of all of a sudden I'm a leader and I don't know how to lead necessarily in this topic. So just wanting to kind of further my development in the subject and people have always interested me. It was really interesting to delve into grad school where you finally don't have to take a lot of those core classes, you can really get into the stuff you love and so I found myself just geeking out on people and what makes them tick and it was a passion for me for sure
Brittney: Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about your work with the Western Youth Network and what that entails?
Jennifer: Yes, so when I started there in 2002, I was the director of our mentoring program and so we are like a big brother big sister organization except we're not affiliated with that national brand. We match students with caring adult mentors, which of course, in the resilience world we know having a safe stable nurturing caregiver is one of the best things we can possibly do for children to mitigate all that toxic stress response. I operated that mentoring program for a number of years and then became Executive Director, at which time I started overseeing our board of directors since we are a nonprofit agency, as well as, the other programs at our agency. We also do a trauma-informed after-school program. That's a time for us to keep the kids safe and supervised in the after school time, help them with their homework, and then also introduce some of those other resilient skills like mindfulness, meditation, physical activity and proper nutrition. We also have a community health component to what we do. We know that kids can only be as strong as our environment allows them to be and so this community health initiative really starts to look at the environment within our high country community and say, “okay, you know what's going on here. What are the community conditions that we need to change that could potentially keep ACEs happening that we can stop? What policy changes can we make?” and those kind of like high-level things. I oversee all those programs with the help of the most amazing staff and board. A lot of my role too, is in fundraising and budgeting and just making sure that we have the financial capacity we need to make all of these amazing programs happen for kids
Brittney: I love to hear that you're kind of taking a two generational approach in preventing ACEs rather than a retroactive one so that's wonderful. What is your favorite aspect of trauma work?
Jennifer: You know, I think it's the hope. We've talked a lot about how in WCCI, our collaborative here, we shouldn't speak of trauma without speaking of resilience. I think that there's such hopefulness in that, particularly when you're working with kids. I believe the earlier we intervene the better and I think science backs that up and so I feel like there's just so much hope in what we do. The hope is in the healing and the possibility of healing but I think the really powerful thing, too, is that for that person you might unlock something. They may have always gone through life thinking something was wrong with them or that they did something wrong. When they start to learn about how their body is having a perfectly normal response to the stress and trauma that they've experienced, all of a sudden, that’s like a weight lifted from them and they can breathe again and maybe that's the thing that unlocks the power that allows them to move on. I see that there's so much hope in that and if we can do this cycle-breaking work. We can change generations to come. I tell people lots of times, it's almost like this is a certain type of religion that I found, that I feel like I need to spread to others because it's truly a thing that's going to heal us and change everything. If we can really start out by building a resilient population then I think we'd be surprised at how healthy we could be in our society
Brittney: Yeah, so I know that you just touched on educating people that change is possible but what else would you want people to know about trauma or trauma work?
Jennifer: It's important to know just how prominent it is. I think that beared out in the first ACEs study in the early 90s and it's still true today. There is no “us and them” there's no “oh that happens to certain types of people” or certain genders, races or anything like that. It's so pervasive and so beginning to normalize that. Dr Nadine Burke Harris, I think in the epilogue of her book The Deepest Well, she talks about how she wants to do a billboard campaign one day called The Faces of Aces and have celebrities and people speaking out to normalize ACEs. Something else that I want people to know is that it's us and we're not alone and it's not something we're walking through alone.
Brittney: Yeah, so switching from more of trauma questions to resilience questions, what does resilience mean to you?
Jennifer: I think it used to mean to me that somebody had this innate ability to bounce back from hard things. What I think of it now is maybe more of a set of skills that we can all learn. We have an amazing program here called Reconnect for Resilience and we've all learned lots of strategies in terms of how to actually help our brains and bodies come down from a state of elevation. I would describe it now as just a set of skills that we can all access if we know the information.
Brittney: Do you have any skills for resiliency that you'd like to share?
Jennifer: Let's see. I am not as well versed in this as a lot of our staff members are who've gone through the training and practice it every day but, you know, I think one of the favorite ones that I have is to think of a time or setting that makes you feel really at peace and then to be able to develop that to such an intense degree. Feel the wind on your skin, see the ocean waves coming in, smell all the air. You really activate all of your senses in that moment until it can bring your neurological system down. I heard somebody yesterday actually describing what it's like to be near water for her and as she described it in such detail, I kind of felt myself being like “ah” that's really nice. The more you can immerse yourself in this sense-oriented event, that was really positive for you, it can have a powerful and pretty quick opportunity to bring your nervous system down.
Brittney: Is there anything else you want to share with us?
Jennifer: Let's see. I can't think of anything other than just to put in a plug. With being at the Western Youth Network I really want people to value early screening like universal screening and early intervention with our children and for anybody who's listening that has the power to take care of families, there’s a solution to this problem and there are people out there like the CDC and SAMHSA who have these solutions written down. All we have to do is follow these methods and give people living wages, affordable and accessible child care, great quality therapy, and access to healthy food. Once we bring these supports around, I think we'd be amazed at how much change could happen. With the early screening and intervention and all of those supports for families that I just mentioned, change is possible and that's what I want us to all remember, is that this is not something that we can’t solve. As a nation we're pretty good at solving public health crises so this is no different, we just have to jump on it.
Brittney: Absolutely and I think that this year more than ever voting becomes important in changing some of those policies.
Jennifer: Absolutely and educating those decision makers
Brittney: Yes, so our final question, how can we learn more about the work that you do and the resources that you're connected with?
Jennifer: Yes. Well, westernyouthnetwork.org is the website for my organization and you can also search for WCCI. The WCCI, our collaborative, we're starting Wednesday Conversations and you can see videos of people who are talking about the work that they're doing in our community. Those two websites will be great places to start.
Brittney: Wonderful! Thank you for speaking with me today and sharing so many insightful things about trauma and trauma work
Jennifer: Sure, happy to be here. Thank you.
Special thanks to Jennifer Warren for her work in trauma, as well as, her time working with WCCI! Join us again on October 23rd, for our conversation with Candis Walker.
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