Collective Trauma, Resilience, and Healing: Violence Street Outreach Workers and Black and Brown Youth Moving through a Healing Justice Framework

Background and Purpose

Black and brown youth living in disinvested communities often endure high rates of violence and other forms of social oppression and trauma which adversely affect their psychological and social well-being. Current social movements have highlighted the importance of understanding the role of collective trauma and healing in approaches to working with youth, and there is an urgent need to identify how youth serving programs can integrate these perspectives in practice. This study explores how a street outreach program serving adolescents impacted by structural violence in Hartford, CT integrates the understanding of collective trauma, resilience, and collective healing in their approach. Street outreach workers share similar intersectional experiences of oppression with the Black and brown youth they serve and perceive well-being and trauma as collective experiences grounded in the context of community and culture.

Methods

Grounded in a healing centered engagement framework (Ginwright, 2018), this study investigated street outreach workers’ perceptions of the key ingredients in their approach. Data were collected as part of a larger CDC funded participatory research project focusing on mindfulness-based supports for youth impacted by gun violence. Focus groups were used to gather perceptions among prevention workers (N=15); participants had an average age of 42 and were majority male (86%) and Black (64%). A Sort and Sift, Think and Shift (Maietta et al., 2021) qualitative data approach was used to analyze collected data.

Results

Findings clustered around three themes: collective trauma as a point of connection; collective resilience occurs alongside collective trauma and adult workers’ own healing is inherent to the work. First, the awareness of collective trauma, stemming from shared experience of structural violence, creates a point of connection between street outreach workers and the youth they serve and provides a context for the street outreach workers’ humanizing and liberatory praxis with the youth; they want to be for the youth the “violence interrupter” they wish they had had in their lives. Second, street outreach workers recognize the experience of trauma as a source of resilience and use this shared experience to build collective resilience with the youth at risk. Finally, street outreach workers’ narratives reveal how workers find joy and a sense of purpose in their work with the youth, and how the awareness and possibility to address some of the conditions that created trauma in the first place can be a source of healing for them.

Conclusions and Implications

The present study centers the wisdom of street outreach workers, individuals who have lived experience in living in marginalized communities, as valuable sources of knowledge for effective ways to integrate a perspective of collective trauma into work with youth. Implications for research and practice on violence prevention include the importance of moving from a trauma-informed approach to a healing centered engagement approach and the value of attending to provider’s own healing in the process. These insights expand our understanding of how we think about responses to trauma and suggest a more comprehensive approach to fostering well-being.