Kitsap Strong - Reflections as I head to the East of the West

The amazing drive into Bremerton

I arrived in Bremerton to meet with Kody Russell of Kitsap Strong, I felt a lot of connection to the Lowestoft and Waveney area in some ways - Kitsap County is a diverse area, there are plenty of affluent areas and 'second homers' enjoying the incredible waterfront views and access to Seattle. But there is also a huge part of Kitsap that encounters depravation, at one time it was the richest county in the United states due to the logging industry - but over time the industry changed and many jobs were lost. The loss was also that of identity, families who assumed they would have generations following a path into logging suddenly lost that opportunity.

Kitsap had areas where they have extremely high ACEs scores accompanied by low resilience levels, the response to this was Kitsap Strong which is an organisation created to develop awareness of the issues associated with developmental traumas, but more importantly to create networks who respond to the issue. I was fortunate to accompany Kody to the Graduate Strong meeting which focusses on schools and school attainment, aiming to embed a trauma informed approach. Similar networks exist across commerce, health etc. The work is a combination of developing strategies and ideas for individual solutions, but also to connect the community with the work - crucial to the concept of Kitsap Strong is that this is community wide endeavour, the idea of the 'Strong' part was a reflection of other areas where they had overcome disasters, the feeling being Kitsap's ACEs were of a similar scale of concern.

It was good to see that the message about ACEs and building community resilience was being taken out to the community, I joined Kody and the team as he delivered an outstanding presentation on the subject to community members, encouraging them to think about the issues that they are concerned about and that they might contribute to supporting with. I think that finding ways to connect the concept to as many people as possible and to ask them what they feel needs to change and whether they can be part of that change is the key to transforming the ACEs study from an academic study into a community lead movement.

The other crucial part of the work in Kitsap, and in Walla Walla as I head there, is the use of a large amount of data and the interpretation of that data in understanding what is happening to individuals and to communities, also to understanding the impact of the work that is being done. Dr Dario Longhi is not only a wonderful person but also a vital part of the work that is being done. His participatory research methods mean that you make use of interveiws and rich anecdotal evidence from people having a lived experience whilst understanding the quantitive data that provides numbers and figures and weight of evidence to support the concepts that are being developed.

Dario and Kody... and me!

I have always felt that it is vital that for the pillars of resilience and trauma informed work to be established successfully we need to be able to measure what we are doing without being burdened by traditional outcomes measures - it is more difficult to truly define happiness, joy, contentment etc than it is to record the number of diagnosis, visits to doctors, and other medical measures. But this is being done, by gaining an experiential insight into people in the community and also understanding what that means to the bigger picture it is possible to measure the work being done whilst understanding why it works and what it means as you travel rather than at fixed times based on the end of specific interventions.

I was fortunate to get to spend two or three days with Dario, this meant I could enjoy his food and his hand built home (!) but also gain a stronger understanding of what has been working and how his research methods work. There is a lot for me to take back, but crucial will be an understanding of what needs to be in place for resilience to emerge in people - the key being that we can work on individual resilience but also need to develop community resilience alongside it.

The ambitions in Kitsap are bold, they want to transform their communities and ensure that the widest population understand what is being done and what their role could be - that's great because that is what I want for us! I'm genuinely inspired by the people that I met and the fact that I can now see practical building blocks for real potential success back home, as I move on to Walla Walla and two weeks embedded in a system that has been working for many years I am hopeful that what I am learning is forming into a very real concept of what might work in the unique communities of Lowestoft and Waveney.

In closing I think that a simple piece of learning is this - that community resilience is a formed from a number of areas, schools and health of course, families, churches and community groups, but also in community pride, in culture and history. If the breaches in resilience are linked to culture then the repair will come from culture and so on - so we must seek to understand where the harm came from in order to understand from where the healing will be derived. I have said before that communities have all of the resources they need to heal themselves, we just need to help them find them - I'm sincere in that belief now.