A Recap on Trauma Informed Care’s Transition to Healing Centered Engagement
There has never been a better moment to analyze the resiliency development of youth. Thinking about today’s 2020 class, which has had the world of COVID-19 thrust upon them, school shootings, and adolescence of living your life publicly online, resiliency will be a key trait for future success. For those working in youth development, resiliency as a focus on programming and evaluation has been a long-running pillar. Yet over time the focus has moved from resiliency, to trauma informed care, to today’s healing centered engagement in youth development.
Resiliency theory first started in the early 1970s with Emmy Werner-a development psychologist-concentrating on resiliency among poor youth in Kaui, Hawaii. She discovered that a third of her candidate pool developed less destructive behaviors even coming from disadvantaged and traumatic backgrounds, and she labeled this group as resilient.
The 1980s brought us the term PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) a direct consequence of high PTSD rates among young men returning from Vietnam. The emphasis of the work moved to identify and address the effects or symptoms of trauma on individuals.
In the early 1990s, youth development organizations started to focus on how they could incorporate resiliency planning into programming for youth. Being able to inject best resiliency practices in the hopes of offsetting further trauma later in life.
Building upon previous generations, in the mid to late 1990s we start to see a combination of focusing on resiliency and trauma-informed care and in the early 2000s the term “youth development” begins to gain popularity. Trauma-informed care was moving away from previous trauma studies in that it didn’t solely focus on how to cure the symptoms of trauma through resiliency training. It moved the questioning from “What’s wrong with you” to “What happened to you to cause this”?
Currently, youth development formative assessment is now evolving into a focus on Healing Centered Engagement. Healing Centered Engagement (HCE) took Trauma-Informed Care one step further. With trauma-informed care, the focus was on an individual's psychological care, in HCE the assessment is more political. More of a pointed look at social justice within communities. As not for profits started to take into account a more holistic approach to addressing needs healing centered engagement became of high interest.
When looking at how we have started to build upon resiliency theory and trauma in youth development, especially in regards to evaluative methods, we can think of it in terms of photography. We held up a lens and narrowed in on the topics of resiliency then trauma and its effects. Later on, we zoomed out and realized that we should be focusing on the larger areas of how social justice within communities can influence the more specific layers of our subject in the picture.
With this we have taken to building upon resiliency theories but with a more holistic and social justice approach. As nonprofit and social innovators move towards programming with Healing Centered Engagement, evaluation and literature reviews are necessary in being able to comb best practices and utilize the current peer-reviewed information. At Mockingbird Analytics we have always focused on social justice and equity when evaluating data, and we are excited to continue this work in connection with HCE.
Interested in learning more about how we can help you incorporate or evaluate Healing Centered Engagement in your program development? You can contact us here to start the conversation.