By Luke Bonham and Holly McGuire
As regular readers will be aware, Neighborhood Partnerships has been centering racial equity in all of our work. As part of our roles as conveners and funder, we are looking at how to integrate the diversity, equity, and inclusion tools and learning spaces into our partnerships. Last month, Neighborhood Partnerships launched a Racial Equity Training Series for the Oregon IDA Initiative in partnership with CASA of Oregon. Free and open to all IDA program providers, the series is our effort to keep this moving forward despite the challenges of remote work and service provision.
We are now entering our 6th month of continued stress and challenges stemming from the ongoing impacts of the pandemic and responses to it—to health, the economy, education systems, and in our homes and relationships. This is building trauma in even the most resourced among us. For many of our savers, this is compounding existing impacts of a deeply inequitable social structure and economy. That’s why we decided to open our training series by learning more about trauma and trauma informed care with Dr. Mandy Davis, the Director of Trauma Informed Oregon.
A significant amount of trauma in our society is a result of systemic oppression and structural violence, causing personal, intergenerational and historical trauma. Understanding trauma as it manifests in ourselves and in clients is critical in the work of supporting savers. It also provides us with a foundation for advancing racial equity within our own spaces. Dr. Davis introduced a variety of tools and strategies that IDA programs and staff can use to start integrating a trauma informed perspective into our service delivery and program design as we work to advance racial equity. If you would like to learn more about implementing trauma informed care at your organization, please reach out to Trauma Informed Oregon.
The series for IDA providers will continue throughout 2020 and hopefully beyond, providing shared spaces and tools to meet the deeply entrenched structures of racism and economic injustice of our state and country. For folks outside the IDA provider network who’d like to participate in the conversation, Neighborhood Partnerships’ RE:Conference is going virtual November 16-17, and will center equity and housing and economic justice. Hope to “see” you there!