Are you disoriented by the many crises we’re experiencing as a society? Trauma Informed Oregon (TIO) Director Mandy Davis knows why.
“The old ways for serving have failed many by treating social, emotional and behavioral issues without getting to the root cause of them: trauma as a result of structural violence, systemic oppression, poverty, disconnected communities and more. The only way to prevent and mitigate this harm and promote resilience is with trauma informed, healing focused, inclusive, culturally grounded practices.”
Much of the harm Davis describes is caused by the policies and procedures of our systems that often prevent access and meaningful engagement to culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate services. This is where trauma informed practices are important to educate about and advocate for practices and policies that promote connection. Examples of this include community-based resilience strategies, affordable quality child care, or family leave policies.
In 2014, the state of Oregon demonstrated their support for these kinds of Trauma Informed Care practices by investing time and money into a statewide collaboration to promote and sustain them across child-, family-, and adult-serving systems. The result led Oregon Health Authority (OHA) to contract with Portland State University (PSU) in partnership with Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and the Oregon Pediatric Society to create TIO.
Today TIO is viewed as both a national and international expert on trauma informed approaches. Recognizing that organizations and systems often hinder the needs of families, TIO believes that people often know what they need to heal: time, caring supports, cultural practices, community, and basic needs. Three of the ways TIO supports those practices are through their work with children and youth, their response to the pandemic, and their leadership in disaster resilience.
Children and Youth in Oregon
“Children need meaningful, positive connections and relationships,” Davis said. “They need space to play and rest. They need to learn about social and emotional development skills, especially in this time of isolation and disconnection. They need math and science and reading, but to learn these skills they first need to be in a state to learn.”
But three hurdles face the children of Oregon today: adverse childhoods, adverse community experiences, and the long-term impacts that COVID-19 has on the brains and bodies of children, adolescents, and families. One symptom of these problems is an increase in violence in youth populations. Davis said, “These behaviors are ways of communicating. What is needed are safe places that support connection, being seen and heard, self-reflection, somatic healing, and rest.”
One example of TIO’s work with Oregon’s children is the support they provided to advance the Bill of Rights for Children of Incarcerated Parents. Working alongside the children and parents who successfully advocated for this Bill they supported a weekend retreat for impacted families to connect and collaborate.
Davis said, “This retreat was a time for this community to come together and through a variety of activities to define how they want to be seen in the world and what they want to advocate for to promote wellness in their lives.”
TIO works together with Parks and Recreation programs, educators, early childhood providers, healthcare, law enforcement, faith communities and more. By interfacing with all of these groups, TIO helps spread knowledge about how our bodies respond to stress. They hope the more people have access to this knowledge, the more will see their own role in this work. For example, in schools TIO includes front office staff, custodians, and cafeteria workers so everyone’s on the same page about providing an environment where students feel they belong.
Likewise, TIO recognizes that we also need to focus on provider wellness.
“How are we caring for the helpers?” asked Davis. “Dysregulated bodies are not helpful to dysregulated bodies. What we know is needed to promote wellness for those we serve is also needed for those who provide care. Policies and procedures that promote spaces to rest and connect, to be heard, to be included in decision making and to be valued.”
Pandemic Response
When you add the COVID-19 pandemic to a history of injustice, systemic oppression, gun violence, and climate impacts, you get a pile-up of toxic stress in Oregon’s communities.
“To survive, we often compartmentalize or put things in boxes to forget or deal with later,” said Davis. “This is an important survival skill, but it does not promote needed change.”
Davis has heard from providers that although systems implemented innovative ways of doing work during the pandemic, the change didn’t stick. Staff now feel betrayed, unheard, and exhausted.
“We have an opportunity, instead, to listen to what worked and put this new learning into policy and practice,” Davis said. “We need to take time to reflect so we will integrate new learning and experiences.”
If we don’t, we’ll keep coming back to “business-as-usual,” not because it worked, but because it feels familiar. Yet the familiar has been harmful to many. Experiences like a pandemic do not only highlight inequity but often make them worse. The principles of TIC help hold us accountable to learn from these times to create better care.
Disaster Resilience
What if we want to take what we learned from the pandemic and apply it to our future, to better prepare for the crises of tomorrow? According to Davis, “What we learned is that our typical response strategies are built around the idea that you prepare, then respond, and then recharge,” she said. “But we have no recharge time right now.”
The toxic stress that’s piled up is not from one event, but many, including the impacts of racism, wildfires, COVID-19, gun violence, and war. This means we’re experiencing uninterrupted, prolonged toxic stress. So we have to be aware that we’re responding to it and being impacted by it all at the same time.
Typical interventions may focus on a point in time, or a symptom, or a person. Those are important strategies, but they are insufficient if they aren’t embedded in a population level, system change approach.
TIO has engaged in a culturally-grounded and community-driven approach through their work with the Disaster Resilience Learning Collaborative. Responding to the wildfire damage in Oregon, this collaboration with the OHA and the United Way of Columbia-Willamette was developed together with Latinx and Indigenous community-based organizations. It provides culturally-responsive, linguistically-relevant, community-driven learning opportunities over several months.
This collaborative received over $400,000 in funding to continue the program, bringing communities together to meet, advocate, and devise policies to support culturally-specific responses to climate change.
“We know what creates flourishing environments,” Davis said, “It’s meaningful connections, a sense of purpose and belonging, empathy, social-emotional skill sets, and basic needs.”
All of this work — with children, the pandemic, and disaster resilience — comes back to Davis’ main argument: Business-as-usual is not working and if we don’t pause to reflect so we integrate better ways, we’ll just go right back to it.
There’s too much need for the systems that exist now. Education, healthcare, social services and other systems have a role, but are not sufficient. We need everyone knowledgeable about trauma-informed, culturally grounded approahces to promote healing and flourishing.