Our June 2024 CTIPP call highlighted the Change Campaign, a multi-tiered initiative to create a sustainable planet and a better future for all. Founder Jesse Kohler (and CTIPP’s on-loan executive director) shared the work and lessons learned so far while promoting well-being throughout society.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT (powered by Descript):
So I think the recording is in progress. So today's tip can call is going to be a briefing on the change campaign. I was inspired by Antron's powerful CTIPP can call last month. Where he brilliantly tied together his lived experiences as well as his professional pursuits. And in the past, I've shared with CTIPP's network things about my loving and supportive family, the eating disorder that I struggled with at 13 after choking on a piece of food and my best friend's death at the age of 15, all of which inspire the work that I do every single day.
But in discussing the change campaign, these experiences and many others, while they certainly shaped my interests in this work the change campaign was really born during the latter half of my time at Oberlin college. The change campaign was the name of my senior project actually, but I really believe that it was born during my junior year.
My major at Oberlin was law and society. When I was going through college, especially early on, I figured that if playing baseball didn't work out as a career, which was my childhood dream, and we all now know did not become my future. I would be an attorney like my poppy. Who I looked up to my whole life as well as other family members, but at the end of my 2nd year at Oberlin, I was arrested for something that I didn't do at a now infamous store on campus that arrested a fair number of college students every year.
Many unjustly in an effort to deter shoplifting. There are many other stories like mine and I know that I'll never forget. The way that I felt so crushed as I was punished for something that I didn't do powerless to the systems that decided that they were going to make a case of me never having had so much as a detention up to that point in my life, my experiences in the quote unquote justice system, maybe not want to work as a part of that system anymore.
At least not at the time. There was a silver lining. To this experience though, which I have recognized as a greater silver lining as time has moved on, which was that the court mandated community service introduced me to a non profit where I fell in love with this work to provide services to folks without cost being a barrier for them to necessarily access those services.
But the impacts of the arrest on my personal life were deep. I used pot to numb the pain, which led to a spiral for the majority of my junior year. Academics and athletics were no longer a priority for me during that time, and outside of a few people, I really withdrew socially. Beyond continuing my volunteer work with Oberlin Community Services, I failed to follow through on many of the commitments that I made.
And then 1 day before a baseball game that spring, a teammate's errant throw during warmups hit me in the head and I got a pretty serious concussion. It was certainly the worst that I have ever had in the recovery process. I isolated in a dark room with no technology or other distractions. And in the days of being concussed, I came to terms with how my life had spiraled out of control.
Over the prior year and how I didn't want to continue on that same path. Moving forward. I started with radical honesty about where I was at and then dreamed really big about where I wanted to end up. And then I created a story that connected those 2 points together. I believe that it was in this integration of my past and dreaming about the future that the change campaign was really born.
Somewhere through this process, I came up with a purpose statement that my new goal in life was to create a sustainable planet and a better future for all, which is now the mission of the organization, which I will discuss further in a bit. But it wasn't until my senior year that I came up with the name, the change campaign for the project that I developed.
I continued volunteering for Oberlin Community Services and had eventually earned the title of Public Health Advocate as I worked to support grants and other initiatives for the organization. During winter break my senior year, after seeing how difficult fundraising was and how necessary general operating support was for any non profit, I developed an initiative to collect change, spare coins and dollars, across the college with different departments competing to see who could raise the most.
The objective was to raise an average of 20 from each student at the college, which would have totaled about 60, 000 in general operating support funds that could be repeated year after year. And this collection of change is where the name, the change campaign actually came from. While we didn't get anywhere close to that goal, I think we wound up raising about a thousand dollars that spring semester.
It started this project that has continued to morph and grow for nearly a decade throughout my career so far. And just last year, the change campaign officially became a 501c3 nonprofit organization. During my first job as a 12 plus fellow at Hill Friedman World Academy in the school district of Philadelphia.
I saw the need for financial literacy curriculum in public education when I was working with students who were making decisions that potentially had a financial implication in the six figures of debt and the change campaign became an idea to develop a gamified curriculum that would teach financial literacy skills by creating bank accounts for students and incentivizing activities that would promote well being.
Academically, physically, socially, while creating a more holistic and quantifiable picture of a student's capacities than just a GPA and standardized test scores. I developed this idea further during my masters and educational leadership, which then got tested following graduation when I was the director of development at North light community center, and we implemented elements into our summer camp and workforce development programming with some success.
Thanks to partnerships with Bryn Mawr trust and Villanova University. This is a picture of me presenting at the end of summer camp. The change campaign poster. We were using to measure those pro social behaviors and positive development, like picking up trash on the playground or helping out a friend and we created these small savings account for campers that we gave out later that day.
But it was also during my master's degree that I got an internship where my main project was to develop what we call the Pennsylvania trauma informed care network, which was my formal introduction to trauma informed policies and practices. This internship completely changed the trajectory of my life as rather than just looking at education reform in a silo.
I learned how a paradigm shift could underlie transformation across all systems and our society. As a whole. It was during this year that I was introduced to the young organization. C tip. For which I volunteered as an intern and then became a board member and served for several years before eventually becoming the first executive director.
At first, the position had to be made available on loan because CTIPP simply didn't have the funding nor the infrastructure to have a staff member. That was like my first job working for the organization. But even as the organization developed further, I have remained on loan for a couple of key reasons that I want to share first.
Leveraging our expanding and yet still very limited capacity to support other staff members rather than bringing me on full time was felt to be a better use of funding than to make up the difference of the current investment for my time as I was willing to work extra. Second, at CTIPP, we take modeling the model very seriously.
And while I certainly work hard in this role and I'm passionate about the trauma informed movement, I know that this isn't unique to me, everybody on this call and so many others. Fit into that category as well. The truth of the matter is that I am largely in this position because I have had my privilege of access to see tip when it was very young as well as the ability to work for no money for several years and could leave a stable job to help build the organization with core values around promoting accessibility, belonging, diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.
We recognize that if I were to just become the executive director at this point, When we didn't have a formal hiring plot process, this wouldn't be equitable. So while we do hope to have a full time executive director in the near future, we need for our capacity to grow and to be able to hire that position fully.
In order to do so when I needed to have a 501 C3 cover to continue in my position, I had the opportunity to formalize the change campaign into a nonprofit. It's amazing to think that within a decade, this initiative emerged from a seedling of an idea in a concussed mind when I was 21 into a national nonprofit organization leading what I hope is transformative work for the betterment of life and our planet.
Now. That perhaps too exhaustive of a background has been provided on where the change campaign came from. I'm excited to share about our work thus far and where we hope it leads before moving on to our 3 main programs. I want to share the 5 core values that I think shape the work we do. To better describe how we are working toward our mission, I developed a 3x7 dimensional matrix.
At an individual level, we are working to promote physical, psychological, social, emotional, cultural, moral, and spiritual well being. While I'm sure that we can discuss more dimensions that could exist, this illustrates that we are focused on promoting holistic wellness. At a systems level, we're working to promote community led, cross systems, trauma informed, prevention oriented, resilience building, healing centered, and sustainability focused change efforts.
These INS levels are common ways of thinking about ensuring that our work has impacts both at the micro and the macro levels. But I also added a values level to this matrix, which describes how we also work to promote accessibility, belonging, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and love. Our second core value is the golden rule, which I assume most folks know.
Is how to is to treat others the way that we want to be treated. We take accountability for our actions and intentions while recognizing that we cannot make everyone happy with every decision that we make, we work to lead with kindness and respect and are humbled by our early experiences, including now, as we are still very small.
And we'll be given and we'll give the best that we can while minding our own well being to sustain scale as we move forward. This is a core value of my poppies and that I have tried to take to heart as best as possible. The third is Mamba Mentality. Growing up near where Kobe Bryant did and getting to watch his career unfold during my childhood and adolescence, he was one of my models for what greatness could look like.
While there were others as well, nobody described the process like Kobe did. We work to be the best through a dedicated process, remaining disciplined, and making the sacrifices necessary to achieve and maintain greatness. I say this today recognizing that we have not achieved the greatness that we are striving for and toward, but believing that committing ourselves to the process, picking ourselves up when things get tough, and always striving for better will get us there someday.
The fourth is the principle of Tikkun Olam. I am Jewish, born and raised. I believe I will be on a healthy spiritual journey for my whole life. I am guided by these principles that I learned growing up. And perhaps none are stronger than Takuna Olam, which refers to various forms of action intended to repair and improve the world.
It is often used when discussing issues of social policy, ensuring a safeguard to those who may be at a disadvantage, which with my currently frustrating limited influence, I call on those in power to consider. We are blessed to be on this beautiful planet and need to take care of it. We have this incredible opportunity for life, and I see it as our responsibility to protect and make it better.
And finally, the fifth principle is the infinite game. For those of you who have known me for a while, you may remember advocacy trainings, where I used to share the golden rule by Simon Sinek, who is a business strategy. Or he is a business strategist. He himself is not a strategy necessarily, but that's about leading with why the infinite game is another principle that I learned from Simon Sinek that talks about success being found in playing the long game.
We work toward a transformational rather than a transactional economy. While we work to win in our pursuits, we view those doing complimentary work to us as partners rather than competitors. Working to be the powerful tide that lifts all ships through collaboration, rather than believing that we can achieve our mission alone.
After all, our mission is not just about us. It's about everyone. So these values provide a compass as we continue to move forward on the three distinct campaigns or programs. And I am so excited to share some of the work that we are doing today. The first area of work that I want to share with you is called full capital.
I will acknowledge that my knowledge of financing at a very high level is relatively limited, but the comparison gives rise to a new model of thinking about how to fund community led cross sector, trauma, informed, prevention, oriented, resilience, building, healing, centered and sustainability focused initiatives beyond just the begging government and philanthropy to work towards short term project outcomes to try and sustain.
Long term processes. Some nonprofits do have backing that works. Many of them have been established for quite a long time, or folks have close relationships with major donors and funders. But as a new young nonprofit, it has been incredibly difficult to raise anywhere close to sufficient funding. Hence why the CTIPP executive director position is still on loan.
This struggle was the case when I was leading development efforts at Northlight Community Center as well. I know these struggles to sustainably fund transformative work are far too common for far too many just to mention, though, we are incredibly grateful. And I thank all of our philanthropic partners who have supported our work to date and helped us move forward from where we were when our work began.
And I look forward to continuing to develop those partnerships, the ones that exist as well as more in the future to continue to sustain and scale our work. But using how project finance works as an analogy for how full capital could function, I'll use how large oil projects in our world today are funded to analogize how we can think of about a transformative way to fundraise for trauma informed policies and practices moving forward.
Let's assume that an oil company has already found where it wants to build the next oil field. While oil companies and magnates may have the money to pay for things themselves, it can be better financially for both them and their funders to leverage their assets, to raise debt, to pay off the construction of a rig and pipeline, and perhaps finance other logistical needs to see the project through to profit.
There are projections for the amount of oil that can be extracted and financial projections for how much money can be made from the sale of that oil. And there is cost that is associated in to make room for potential spills and other problems. So that way they are not operating as a company at the margins.
Projects are then financed through facilities that virtually guarantee that the money needed for development will be available, sometimes into the billions of dollars. So long as certain benchmarks are met. I joke with folks from this world that if pipelines were built, like nonprofits get funded one grand at a time and reporting on outcomes needed to get new money, our society's carbon footprint would be substantially reduced.
And I don't think as many pipelines would get funded at all. But the economics for this field of work are well known and the financing works in the favor of all the economic interests of the parties that are involved. Imagine now if we could fund transformative work through the same model, there would need to be some method to ensure that the work being funded met some framework that provided and proved to develop measurable return on investment.
So it's not just that every new idea under the sun could be funded this way, but the trauma informed movement has developed such frameworks. I just got back from visiting the wonderful team at the Neighborhood Resilience Project in Pittsburgh, which has measured improvements in health outcomes at a hyper local level that will have direct cost benefits to both health systems and government expenditures.
We can look at the success of the family policy council in Washington state, which measured a 1. 1 billion dollar cost avoidance as a result of its work. There are so many more examples of tangible return on investment from the great work. This movement is doing. We can even move away from an entire community context and look at schools that have reduced expulsion rates.
Which reduce the cost for alternative education opportunities for students as well as workplaces, which can include schools that increase retention rates, which then saves money on both hiring and training costs the economy for this work exists. 1 of the challenges is that the cost avoidances are generally demonstrated in public budgets outside of the workplace example that I described above at least.
We need partnership with governments, public, private partnerships, as well as a vehicle to capture some of the cost avoidance so that we can further invest in the mechanisms that produce the return on investment. This is a necessary piece to the puzzle because our systems, due to their own unresolved traumas that our work is focused on addressing at a systems level, do not share well with each other.
When we invest in trauma informed education, for instance, the immediate return on investment is generally going to be seen in juvenile justice system, for instance, or other tertiary systems rather than in education itself, where we may actually see a hike if the reduction in new alternative education costs.
Don't offset the increase in graduation rates that require more resources, which is ultimately a good thing for our society. But to sustain and scale that return on investment, we need to take the savings in 1 system and invested elsewhere. We often fail to capture this cost avoidance from the source and instead other systems reap the rewards, which leads to unsustainable initiatives that do not allow for exponential growth.
Going back to the success that we saw in the work of the Family Policy Council, that 35x return on investment over the 17 years of the Family Policy Council's work, more so catalyzed by the work over the last dozen or so years after a strategic reshift in focus following the publishing of the original ACEs study, realized by the state's Serves as a powerful proof of concept to build public private partnerships that allow for us to develop community capacity and coordinate through state and or local governments to sustain layering and looping learning processes that allow for communities to innovate and own their processes of healing, looking at the population attributable risk for adverse childhood experiences.
We can see how investing in the reduction of ACE prevalence would pay off in many ways throughout our society. Cardiovascular disease has a 25. 5 percent population attributable risk to ACEs. The data from this study was from Washington State specifically, which means that more than a quarter of all cardiovascular disease in the state's population was due to exposure to ACEs.
Population attributable risk for cancer was 24. 3 percent from the same study. While I won't overstate what we know because of the context of this study, it's safe to assume that these numbers are probably similar in other populations as well, though data may not be tracked as robustly and the same questions may not be asked of that data.
But about a quarter of the cases of the top two killers of Americans today, which cost our country tremendous amounts of money. are attributable to ACEs. I know that I'm preaching to the choir here, so I don't need to share the litany of other health outcomes that are highly associated with ACEs. But we also know that a number of social problems have substantially higher population attributable risk than even these health outcomes.
The population attributable risk for IV drug use and using painkillers to get high, I'm Or 78 percent and 54 percent respectively. And while these numbers come from different studies, they raise the attention to addressing the root causes of the opioid epidemic that continues to ravage our society beyond just the opioid epidemic.
Other substance misuse, like alcoholism, which has a 65 percent 65 percent are correlated with aces. And beyond just substance misuse, violence, and other criminal offenses are correlated as well with adult incarceration, having a 60 percent population attributable risk. If we reduce ace prevalence, we reduce cost burdens to systems.
This does not even take into account the increased productivity that will result from a reduction in adverse childhood experiences as well, which we know would be the case. This has the power to transform the stresses on systems that will allow them to operate fundamentally differently. If we collect the right data, Ask the right questions of the data.
We can develop economic models and sciences that show how we can sustain and scale these initiatives that not just pay for themselves, but will also allow for us to pay off other debt burdens that our government is currently stressed by and move toward innovation and other important areas. I oftentimes say that the economy for this sort of work is 34 trillion.
And growing this is not just a moral obligation to take care of constituents and communities. It is an economic necessity given our current state of affairs. And while the work accomplished in Washington state provides a shining star for us to move toward the incredible return on investment was accomplished within a single generation.
Unlike an oil well, going back to that analogy, which generally will last somewhere between 15 and 30 years and then dry up initiatives like this will exponentially increase return on investments at the time markers as the transmission of intergenerational trauma is reduced. And even more so for the following generations who are born to those children, at some point after several generations, because of how growth curves work, return on investment will likely plateau.
But our society and systems will operate so fundamentally differently that we won't need to generate the same cost avoidance to drive out of debt. We will be better positioned to thrive in a variety of other ways. While this may sound like a capitalist proposition, and it is, Because it is leveraging existing capitalist structures in novel ways.
This is still along the efforts of systems transformation. This work in the financing side of it could literally flip the incentives of systems toward prevention. Currently, we know that health care makes money when people get sick. Doctors can bill insurance, whether public or private, when someone comes to visit them or they need some sort of test or need treatment.
This is all necessary, but full capital creates an economic vehicle to finance well being beyond just the absence of illness using the powerful science of aces and population attributable risk associated with many of the greatest health and social outcomes our society is facing. We can leverage capital to move further upstream.
Of course, this same framework is, the same framework can be used to finance other critical needs our society faces, such as avoiding and reducing the impacts of the climate crisis, not to measure, not to mention other elements of the trauma informed movement beyond just ACEs. But the power of ACEs as a place to start is that they are quantifiable and the most powerful public health predictor we have.
This is why I call the initiative full capital. I believe that we get capitalism wrong in that we focus economic capital so much on building more economic capital rather than social capital, intellectual capital, cultural capital, and myriad other forms that would help to grow economic capital even more itself.
It would be like growing a pizza by only creating a single slice of a pie. If we build the whole pie, The economic slice will grow larger as will all the others, and we'll be able to sustain the continued growth by investing in all forms of capital. We've reduced the costs. Our systems are currently burdened by and therefore create better opportunities to sustain and scale the important work.
Our society needs. Michael, I appreciate your comment in the chat very much. I could go on longer about full capital, but in not wanting to fall too deeply into what we're working to build there. very much. I'll move on to describe the next area of the work that the CHANGE campaign is driving, which I refer to as LOVE.
LOVE stands for Lowering Overdose and Violence Epidemics, and was the name that the community coalition that I led while at Northlight Community Center named that initiative to embed trauma informed care into our programming and throughout the community we were working to develop before COVID started and before I left.
LOVE was chosen by the group I worked with at the time because it was Philadelphia focused. As Philly is known as the city of brotherly love, that's a beautiful picture of Love Park that is seen on this slide just steps away from Philadelphia City Hall. And it also highlights the opportunities to address some of our society's most intractable issues by addressing the root cause of trauma.
We have continued to see more work done to create trauma informed approaches to epidemics of overdose deaths and violence among others. Just yesterday, for instance, we had the Surgeon General release a first of its kind report naming firearm violence as an urgent public health crisis. We are working to more fully address these and other crises while the love initiative at North light has not continued as we had planned at the time.
The lessons from the process have inspired so much of the work I have done since. 1 big thing is that when I left Philly to start working at the national level and move to DC. I promised that I would come back to the city. I consider my home and make a greater impact there than I was able to before as well as elsewhere.
And I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to begin to actualize this promise as the healing cities coordinator for Philadelphia this coming year in my role with the change campaign and undoubtedly many partners. We have shared on CTIPP can before I believe that it was the January 2022 CTIPP can call.
If you want to look back at to it about the awesome work and innovation of the Elijah coming healing cities act in Baltimore as a quick overview, this bill made Baltimore the 1st city to legislate trauma informed care through trainings and coordination across agencies that deliver services throughout the city.
This bill, inspiringly, began after three young people advocated to city council following a school shooting to support their healing in response, instead of penalizing them with metal detectors and police officers at their schools that had so often been the city's response when things like this had happened.
They said, Give us the resources that we need to heal instead of punishing us and city councilman Zeke Cohen, who was a teacher before he became a council member, took those words to heart and champion the build a passage and the Elijah coming healing cities act was officially signed into law in February 2020.
1 year after the school shooting that prompted the advocacy that led to the bills creation and after a long process of co creation of what that legislation needs to look like CTIPP was brought in as a partner to collaborate on a national expansion effort alongside healing cities, the center for community resilience and the National League of cities.
These expansion efforts have been successful, and there are efforts underway to see how this work, including, but not just limited to legislation can spread to other cities and to create learning communities across cities engaged in this work, including Cincinnati and Philadelphia to start. We do hope that this goes much broader as time moves on.
The Change campaign will support expansion efforts in Philadelphia in the next year, and I have developed The Love Act to hopefully replicate and build upon the success of the legislation in Baltimore tailored to the unique needs and opportunities in Philly to move this work forward. First. Let me acknowledge the work that has already been done in Philly, and love seeks to build upon that work and drive it further to more impact, to more positively impact Philadelphians all around the city.
A blue ribbon report from the 90s, which is when I was born, highlights the importance of creating a trauma informed city. The strategic plans and work of the Philadelphia ACE task force moved this citywide planning from trauma for trauma informed approaches even further and work within agencies and systems has worked to promote trauma informed care in the city.
We are not starting from scratch with this work, but there is definitely room to continue to develop a truly and more trauma informed city. Philadelphia has a tremendous amount of focus on trauma informed approaches. There is no shortage of expertise and programming available to organizations and service recipients.
Truly wonderful people are doing work all across the city to promote trauma informed care. However, there is a lack of coordination to ensure that this work is driven as effectively as possible. In fact, there is a fair amount of competition among providers with aligned missions, which inhibits the potential for a truly trauma informed city to flourish as collaboration is a key principle of trauma informed care.
Now, this is not to point blame at the organizations and providers who do this work. There are forces that create these conditions, such as grants from government and philanthropy with limited funding that essentially pin organizations with similar missions against each other for the scarce resources that are made available for this work.
I don't say this to place blame, but it is to acknowledge and address that this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed in making and working toward Philadelphia, becoming more trauma informed the love act does not need to be legislated. But it has been said that legislation would support this container for Philadelphia.
And so the Love Act is a piece of model legislation that would create such a container for trauma informed work to come together within the city in new ways to address the root causes of our most intractable problems in our society. It has three main components. Number 1 is the authorization of the development of sustainable investment pipeline to build greater community capacity through community led cross systems, trauma, informed prevention, oriented resilience, building healing, centered and sustainability focused coalitions to that support layering and looping of learning processes as well as pure support through other coalitions to drive trends of public health rates toward more positive outcomes.
Author is the 2nd prong would be the authorization of a broad public engagement and education campaign about trauma and trauma informed approaches and systems thinking across all dimensions of the social ecological framework, as well as opportunities for healthy processes that support the integration of this information.
And the 3rd prong would be the authorization of an interagency coordination and alignment to collect synthesize and share qualitative and quantitative data across communities and systems and strategize ways to sustain and scale cross system initiatives. A good example of that would be braiding and blending of existing block grants that all have trauma as a root cause.
The, this authorization would support coordination alignment that allow for to that, that create conditions of empowerment and safety for participatory democracy to flourish throughout the constituency. And. Just to mention, it is my goal that this authorization directs the collection of data around cultural and social determinants of health and the implementation of an actuarial science and economic vehicle to capture cost avoidance and reinvest a reasonable and sufficient portion back into the ongoing development of general community capacity.
Essentially legislating and allowing for us to study what I described with full capital. Now, you'll note that no appropriations are currently tied to this model legislation, though there certainly could be a certain portion of opioid settlement monies, for instance. Or philanthropic investment in the city and other funding streams could be focused on this project and it could be done without new appropriations needing to pass.
There will need to be funding tied to the actions. This legislating this legislation is supporting. No doubt. But new government funding is just one of several ways that this could be done as cost avoidance is created per hour conversation about full capital. It will become much easier to drive appropriations to sustain and scale these initiatives, but it doesn't necessarily have to start this way.
There are a number of ways this legislation could play out, but I will highlight a quick landscape analysis to show how existing organizations promoting trauma informed work at various levels in Philadelphia could come together to help carry this work forward. One thing to note before I do that. Is while I have had some conversations, there have been no firm promises that have been made from any organization, nor legislator that promised to be a part of this work.
What I hope to show with this is the ways in which I am thinking about partnership and collaboration as I am planning to move forward. The exception to that, however, is that in the fall, I will begin a 2 year executive master's degree in public administration at the University of Pennsylvania's fell school of government, which will be a wonderful position to operate within Philadelphia from I have been accepted.
That much is confirmed. I can say that, but the other partners that I mentioned are not to dictate what will or will not happen, but rather show some possibilities of how love can move forward. The potential partners that I will run through are ordered in terms of the three prongs of how the legislation is laid out on this slide.
It's not exhaustive. And I'm just trying to show about, like I said, how I'm thinking about partnership. And it's not intended as any hierarchy or order of importance by any means. The 1st group of potential partners will be those who could support the delivery of enacted legislation and the 2nd group will be the legislators and other external partners who we could lean on to support the policy passing through City Hall in terms of the 1st prong with the grants to community coalitions, there are a number of partners in Philadelphia who could emerge the scatter.
Good foundation. Who wrote the handbook on trauma informed philanthropy is a Philadelphia focused foundation whose work has recently spread to become the fiduciary partner for Philadelphia's opioid settlement funds and could help to enliven the values of trauma informed philanthropy to support communities throughout the city.
Further, the health federations of Philadelphia were the main coordinators of the mobilizing action for resilient communities or mark project and have experience coordinating networks of communities engaged in processes that promote community. Thank you. Thank you, Amy, that helped to promote community resilience and develop trauma informed strategies, which will be helpful for communities engaged in this work, participating in an action and learning community.
Additionally, there are a number of neighborhood groups and organizations already doing this work, such as in Kensington and where I work, some of whom partnered with others to develop a community driven guide to developing trauma informed communities. Philadelphia is known as a city of neighborhoods, like you see on this slide here.
And there are so many organizations that serve specific neighborhoods. One of the lessons that I hope we learn through love as this work continues to grow is that even in a single city, There cannot be a one size fits all approach to this work. The strategies will depend on the population's resources, needs, and desires of different areas.
And while at a national level we may lump all Philadelphians as simply living in Philly, when you're there, Man Yonk is different than Mount Airy, frankly, East Mount Airy is different than West Mount Airy, which is different than Kensington, which is different than Center City and so on. The diversity of communities is beautiful and should be celebrated as well as recognized as we develop strategies to positively impact people's day to day lives.
In terms of the 2nd prong Lakeside Educational Network and Lakeside Global Institute is a premier trauma informed training institution that is already woven into so much of the training that is done in Philadelphia and powerfully has invested in creating a technological infrastructure, which includes recording studios and creative staff.
And software infrastructure that can deliver high quality, open source content to folks throughout the city, which could be enhanced by support from large cable companies, such as Comcast and local news companies that are based in Philadelphia. There are many people throughout the city who are trained facilitators to support engagement among coalitions that promote conversation and integration of these principles of trauma informed approaches that are already trained by lakeside.
And in that network. For the 3rd prong, there may not need to be there. There may not be a need to create a new entity to support cross agency coordination within city government, which would be ideal if we can already leverage an existing office and find capacity in the existing structures. 1, such option could be the office of diversity, equity and inclusion, which works with city departments, external partners and community members to dismantle institutional and structural barriers that have held back many Philadelphia residents for far too long when we look at the traumatic forces that impact Philadelphia.
Many of them will fall squarely within this definition of their work because racial trauma in the city of Philadelphia runs deep. From the redlining that has impacted the city and black and brown families in Philadelphia since the 1930s, to the 1985 move bombing, and other incidences of racialized institutional violence, and much more.
Trauma in the city of Philadelphia and structural racism are interrelated. Dr. Wendy Ellis has said that we cannot get to equity without healing first. So there is an opportunity to leverage existing infrastructure to promote healing cities. I would understand if they do not feel that this fits within their current capacity and scope of work, but I do think that it's an important place to start.
And I do hope that there are so many more potential partners, and we are working hard to power map other organizations and resources throughout the city who may be able to support and be supported by this work from community. For those who don't know, redlining is a practice that was done that essentially excluded.
Insurance billing for housing, and it was a racist practice that has essentially impacted the ability for folks to bill and families and communities
to build. Can I say a quick thing about redlining? Yeah, Michael. In the 50s and 60s. when there was still Jim Crow, there was still lynchings city planners drew a red line around black neighborhoods, destroyed the neighborhoods, the local grocery store shoe repair, and built multi story projects with no balconies.
And it, what it did to black communities nationwide was part of the destruction you're talking about. Thank you. And really, everybody should know that along with all the structural racism that the impact of redlining was just like a bomb thrown in black neighborhoods and everything you're talking about is to raise up those populations.
To be sustainable again. So thank you for mentioning that.
Appreciate that, Michael. It needs to be part of a truly trauma informed approach, right? The impacts of that run deep intergenerational. I wholly agree. Appreciate that chaplain James from community centers and other hyper local organizations to agencies that work across the city and other national organizations with an interest in Philadelphia.
Many more partners will undoubtedly continue to emerge as we build a coalition that moves forward. And just to put it in the universe, I'm a huge Philly sports fan. For those of you who don't know, don't normally do this, but there are my gritties. I have an eagle that is Elliot. We're still waiting for there to be a Philly fanatic doll made by squishables.
But it would be so awesome to have the partnership of sports teams alongside with other major companies that have huge footprints in the city to be a part of this work as well. As we work to promote the legislation, there are a number of partners that we can work with within and outside of city hall who focus on legislation.
I was told to give the new mayoral administration about six months to settle in before approaching them, which will be next month will be the six month anniversary. So I plan to begin to approach folks within city government after the July 4th holiday to begin having conversations about love. Mayor Parker actually graduated from the master's program that I'm about to start attending in 2016, which I hope will serve as an introduction, perhaps not to her directly.
But to someone on the administration's policy priorities team, in addition to the mayor, the 1st city council member that I plan to approach about this is Councilman Curtis Jones, Jr. Who is the chair of the public safety committee, which I believe has a good chance to be the committee of jurisdiction for this legislation because of its work to reduce substance misuse and violence.
Councilman Jones's district includes Manioc, which is where Northlight Community Center is located, and I actually met him years ago. I don't think that he would remember that, but it's just a nice story. In addition to approaching Councilman Jones's staff to discuss because of potential committee alignment, I will also work to meet with City Council President Kenyatta Johnson and Vice Chair of the Whole Council Appropriations Committee and Majority Leader Councilwoman Kathryn Gilmore Richardson.
In these meetings, we will learn the right directions to go to advocate for the advancement of the love act and hopefully gain some powerful champions on city council to show the importance of contingency planning. As I learn more, there could be another committee that is deemed to have jurisdiction over this legislation, or at least some part of it.
This could potentially come under the jurisdiction of the Public Health and Human Services Committee, whose chair is Councilwoman Nina Mott, and it could potentially come under the jurisdiction of Neighborhood Services Committee, whose chair is Councilman Brian O'Neill. In addition to the advocacy within the city government, I also hope to have support from other organizations in Philly.
Including those mentioned before, as well as others like Children's First, who ran the kids campaign with some similar recommendations that they led during the mayoral campaigns last year, and I hope to continue to build upon as things evolve. It is my hope that others will see their own goals in this work.
It is my hope that love gets adopted by others in the city with more power than I have. With that, the name might change. Others with more experience may change some of the language that I proposed. While I have thought about this project a lot, as I hope you can tell, and I'm committed to continuing to do the most important outcome of this work will be developing a coalition throughout Philadelphia to move toward collective impact.
Ford a trauma informed Philadelphia. There is not ego in this and it should not be mine. I just hope to get to play a role in the promotion of what is undoubtedly to me, at least necessary to help the city move forward. This will be a learning experience and journey. And I am very fortunate that we will be documenting the process in partnership with the creative team at Lakeside to hopefully inspire advocacy across the country, maybe around the world to promote trauma informed policies and practices.
I'm excited to share that what I learn along the way with a broad with a broader audience uplift diverse lived experiences and community context into the film and provide opportunities to hopefully inspire continued growth for this movement. It is our greatest hope that the love film serves as an educational tool about the importance of trauma informed policy as well as an empowerment tool for trauma informed advocates.
We have a general idea for what the film would look like, some of which I presented to you all today in terms of strategy and thoughts going in, but we also know that this story will tell itself over time. It's exciting that there will be able to be this learning experience that we hope serves as a catalyst for the city to create a necessary intervention that heals the systemic trauma that ails the movement in Philadelphia by creating a structure to influence collaboration and give power to communities.
as well as become a tool that promotes trauma informed policy elsewhere and at more levels. I recognize that many people on the line and in tips network know me more for the work that I get to do as tips executive director and I truly say that it is a privilege to get to do this work for the past 3 plus years in this role for the last 6 or 7 years total and my work is tips executive director accounts for half of my time.
Back to its early days when CTIPP was first formed, CTIPP was founded by several leaders in the trauma informed movement because there was a missing national advocacy voice for the trauma informed movement, and a missing vision for what a truly trauma informed society could look like. There has been a lot of learning as the organization has worked toward this goal for over eight years, with exponential growth in the work that CTIPP has done.
With the start of the national trauma campaign, 5 years ago, which has since become a core part of can and the hiring of a full time team over the past 2 and a half years or so there are many challenges that emerge trying to operationalize such an ambitious mission. With less than a 300, 000 annual operating budget.
But we feel blessed to have experienced an increase in support since COVID. And we believe that we are on the cusp of exponential growth over the next few years to scale CTIPP's capacity, to support the growth of the movement as a whole. One of my greatest learnings as a leader thus far in this position has been the need for structure and plan to achieve our mission.
As I said, in the last seat tip can call of 2023. at 1st, we tried to do everything in the world to achieve our mission to create a trauma informed society in which all individuals, families and communities have the opportunities and supports necessary to thrive. It was like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what stuck.
This has led to some incredible work that has shown us where there are opportunities for us to move forward, but it's also caused its fair amount of burnout and undue stress that I take responsibility for. It has led to difficulty in terms of communicating our strategic vision for how we move from our current capacity to a larger organization that can more sustainably take on the full scope of the work that is necessary to support the movement.
What would this really look like? I am sure that over the next couple of years as I go through the EMPA program, I will continue to learn about our more about program evaluation, strategic planning, and hopefully make connections that enable CTIPP to continue to grow. But after a couple of years of traveling around the country and meeting with many advocates, practitioners and other partners and change.
A more clear direction for what is needed has emerged and how we can work within our current capacity to set on the path to get there. This year, I stopped traveling as much to focus on developing a strategic vision for the work and moving toward executing on this plan. I will just say I miss that travel so much.
The speaking engagements and the meetings were so fun and I look forward to when the opportunities arise to do that again. But in just 6 months, it's clear that slowing down has provided an opportunity to scale up. CTIPP's existing programming of IDEASLAB will continue to be the container that we grow within, which you can find the concept notes of what we are working toward on our website.
But there are intermediate steps within each of these programmatic buckets that we are leaning into as an organization to build toward our greatest ambitions. See tips community advocacy network. See tip can was originally created by Dan press in 2018 during the advocacy around the support act. And when the rise from trauma act was 1st introduced to let folks know what was going on at the federal level in terms of policy as well as supporting and connecting folks engaged in advocacy efforts at the state, local and tribal levels.
As we have continued to grow, CTIPP CAN calls became space for different presentations to promote trauma informed work in a number of different arenas. This fall, CTIPP will again shift as we will work to promote a trauma informed model to advocacy itself and support advocates in their own pursuits as we work toward promoting trauma informed policy and practices.
Across a number of sectors, we will have a community of practice among advocates to share their experiences and processes of promoting trauma, informed approaches in the spaces that they are most interested and building a supportive network for advocates to be able to lean on as they continue moving forward as Antron shared last month.
We will also be promoting trauma informed approaches to youth advocacy. In addition to promoting these approaches amongst adult advocates in our network. There will be some differences. We're going to leverage the wisdom from the advocacy series and the ebook that we are finishing up this summer, which is a product of Whitney's work with CTIPP that while doing this, we will continue to lead advocacy efforts as an organization with goals.
Congress around the rise from trauma act, community mental wellness and resilience act and reauthorizing and supporting the interagency task force on trauma informed care alongside other legislation that comes up such as the strong support for Children's Act, which I had a conversation about with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley's office earlier this week.
Press on will have 2 main press on will also have 2 main functions. We have just concluded our 2nd climate community of practice in partnership with the International Transformational Resilience Coalition, working with communities to build population level resilience to the impact of extreme weather events and other disasters, rather than just reacting.
If and when they happen, commissioning program to further support communities that go through the C. O. P. And we'll do another COP in the new year. Additionally, we will work with states to promote trauma informed policies and support finding ways to advance the work among state partners, leveraging the wisdom of our comprehensive vision and policy reports.
All of this will inform the continued planning for the materials that need to be produced, which has happened out of ideas lab in the past as we move away from producing the quantity of reports that we have been for a little bit, at least until we build capacity, it provides us with an opportunity to more fully leverage the reports that we have developed as Laura, who leads our communications efforts will create content to continue to build the movement.
While we will still come out with some thought leadership pieces, undoubtedly, we will focus the majority of our energies on leveraging existing resources to build out the programming of CTIPP can and press on and grow the network toward their lofty goals of becoming a network of grassroots advocates.
All over the country to reach out as constituents to advance policy and practice change while being congruent with trauma informed approaches. We are promoting and building that infrastructure that connects coalitions down to the local level and creating reinforcing learning loops across national state, local and tribal levels.
To inform the ongoing development of the trauma informed movement, ensuring that we are co creating knowledge bases with those working at different levels to support coordinated efforts across the movement. While also maintaining focus on work being integrated into our social fabric through the grassroots, our learnings from these programmatic steps will influence what we develop out of ideas lab in the future, both in terms of what the movement needs and synthesizing what we learn through our network.
This strategy falls in line with our development strategy as we believe that clearly communicating our programming delivery will help to enhance our development efforts so that we can sustain our organizations work and scale it to be able to do more toward our long term goals. Which essentially work toward becoming an intermediary organization for the movement, including, but not limited to government affairs work and advocacy supports across the trauma informed movement, making sub grants to community coalitions, Supporting learning communities, providing financial backing and infrastructure where there may be and so much more.
We need to build our capacity exponentially to accomplish this, but I believe that there will continue to be more opportunities to grow the team. We're going to grow our team thoughtfully. So we don't lose the culture that we have worked so hard to develop internally and externally, but we need to continue to build funding pipelines to develop the organization more fully.
Over the next couple of years, as we engage in solidifying this work, we will enhance these pipelines to build organizational capacity and the movement as a whole. As I said earlier, to be the tide that lifts all ships. The change campaign looks forward to continued partnership in supporting tip to realize its full potential and in doing so support the trauma informed movement and it's continued growth.
That is a lot more of my work than I generally share with folks, especially through tip. So as I wrap up, I just want to thank you for your time and attention as I talk about this work that I am so grateful to get to do less than a decade ago. I was sitting in my dorm room with a bad concussion having spiraled into some really bad ways of life.
And had a dream and while I'm far from where I hope that dream ultimately lands, I am filled with hope for the ways this work can continue building upon itself in the years ahead life will look fundamentally differently than it did, or it will look fundamentally different in a decade. I hope for the better and I hope for the fortune of many more decades of continued development ahead.
I wish that not just for me, but for everyone and this movement as a whole. This work can be excruciatingly difficult at times. In direct service roles and indirect service roles, I have found that holding on to my dream and my mission to be critical In continuing to navigate the most difficult times as I did in college and have done so many times since particularly when things are hard.
I acknowledge the hard truths that contribute to my current reality and work to create a story to help me see a pathway toward where I want to grow. It is yet to get me to where I hope to someday be, but generally. It seems to have built hope to continue moving forward, and I always rely on the mission that I developed to create a sustainable planet and a better future for all to guide the work that I do.
The change campaign has inspired hope for me to continue moving forward, and I hope it does the same for you as well. CTIPP has provided a platform for me to share my experiences and perspectives to inform policy and practice, and I hope that it does for you as well. Both of these organizations did this for me before I officially worked for them, and I believe that they embody these principles for everyone.
When these organizations are working at their best. It is my greatest hope that we create platforms that allow for this to be possible for all of you and millions of others as well as we build this movement to prevent trauma and foster transformational resilience throughout our society just to mention.
Our can call next month is going to be on trauma informed education as well as trauma informed approaches for students with learning differences. We would love to see you there and please stay in touch as we move toward can becoming a community of practice. Of advocates practicing trauma informed advocacy as they promote trauma informed policy and practice.
And if you want to sign up for next year's community of practice to support the development of coalitions in our climate community of practice, please stay in the loop. We are going to be sharing more information about those as the summer rolls on. So please stay in touch. I value each of you and look forward to continuing to build this movement together.
Again, this was a privilege to get to share all of this. And I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
Comments