Walla Walla Week 1, Part 1

So I am in the middle of my first week in Walla Walla, I am based with Teri Barila of Community Resilience Initiative who has had a remarkable impact upon the entire community through her work on ACEs and resilience. As well as creating practical networks and organisations to empower communities, she has worked with Dario to create a stunning base of researched evidence.

Walla Walla is well known by many as the home of Lincoln High, the subject of the Paper Tigers documentary movie - and whilst I would encourage people to view that I would say that it is not the whole story, here in Walla Walla it is a broader and wider community initiative that has created a culture open to prioritising the emotional health of children and communities as a vital part of delivering social cohesion, academic success, and healthier, happier people.

The road to Walla Walla!

So how is this happening? Firstly a lot of work is done to 'name' what we want to see, I am attending a City Council proclamation declaring October as Resilience Month in Walla Walla - I think that's pretty effective way of telling people that this is important to us. Activities are taking place through the month including my appearance as Churchill at a children's treasure hunt!

I hit the ground running, after a visit Westside High a specialist school provision on Thursday I then completed the 5 hour drive to Walla Walla and attended Teri's resilience training on Friday - every member of school staff in the Walla Walla district is mandated to attend training in trauma informed approaches and resilience. The session was powerful and many times people reflected that they wish they had had more awareness sooner. It was clear that as part of a changing of approach and culture this is a key part of the process, the widest possible understanding of the evidence and the process allied to an opportunity to work through real life scenarios. Much like Kody delivering training at a community level this feels like something that we could benefit from in Lowestoft.

In the afternoon I met The President... of Whitman College, which was a great opportunity and found that there was a real ally for the resilience cause there. The event was the celebration of this years internship / fellowship programme - this is where local community organisations put forth an opportunity for a talented college (UK readers remember this means Uni) student to work with them on a transformative project. What I loved about this was the aspiration it created in what is a transient population to make a lasting impact upon a community - at the same time it gives local organisations access to brilliant young minds. Each of them had been through an interview process and shown a huge amount of passion for the project they were involved in, Teri this year is working with Brent Cummings and his 21st Century project who are a new after school programme running - they are partnering with Dario as well in producing more of his outstanding participatory research, indeed children had helped to identify the questions that need to be asked.

Dinner with Dario and Brent, Teri, Whitney and the Whitman Fellow Katherine

On Monday I had the chance to meet with Brent, Dario had joined us from Olympia at this stage and so we were discussing research methods and it was a chance for me to meet Andrew Rodriguez who runs the Commitment To Community (C2C) programme (originally created by Teri) and Jim Byrnes who runs the Friends Of Children Of Walla Walla mentors programme. Both of these ideas have a crucial role in embedding community resilience, the mentors programme links adults and students up across the city to provide support to them and encouragement - it also creates a key strand in community resilience which is adults outside the family engaging positively with young people. If you live on a street where an adult will step in when a child is doing something wrong then you instantly live somewhere that is more likely to see you live longer, be more healthy, and more successful. The C2C programme is focussed largely within the significant Latino community in Walla Walla who have traditionally not been the best advocates for themselves, the individual and community outcomes have been really remarkable and indeed quite moving when you hear the way in which people feel about being empowered.

It is important to stress again the vital role that the partnership Teri has with Dario plays, the quality and concept of his research is such that it not only provides a method for recording the effectiveness of the work but also builds a narrative about why and how it works and points towards further development and community needs. Dario was working with Jim and Andrew to think about how their programmes could deliver good quality data and rich community stories.

Tuesday saw some further time with Andrew and Dario and the chance to meet with Peggy Needham who runs the Sources Of Strength suicide prevention initiative - this is a peer to peer support initiative that has the intention of identifying the areas of peoples lives that provide the greatest support and to help peers to support one another in becoming stronger and more resilient. Crucial to the offer is that it has sustainability built in as it creates a network of peers who will have knowledge that they can apply across a lifetime. It is also useful in supporting the identifying of bullying, isolation, and substance misuse. As with many things in the trauma informed world the model is great but the people are crucial and Peggy is an incredible advocate for this work and the programme, she has a passion for making this work linked to lived experience and her deep knowledge of the issue - I am hoping that there will be a natural link for us to keep in touch and to share knowledge - suicide prevention is a global effort.

Arrival at Lincoln! Very cool.

I had the honour of visiting Lincoln High School, home of the Paper Tigers documentary which for many people put Walla Walla on the trauma informed map. Whilst that is certainly not the full story there is little doubt that this is a place that 'gets it', staff were there for training and so I will have the chance to learn more from them informally at a later date but it was clear that the passion for knowing students as individuals and caring for their trauma remains uppermost - as with many schools I still see the self-care side of teaching as an essential element, but teachers like many professionals will always find it hard to prioritise - they care you see!

So that is just the first half of the first week in Walla Walla and I was already full of learning and excitement, combined with the fact that the area is just so utterly beautiful and it would be remiss of me not to comment on the fact that everything is happening at a breakneck pace - Teri is an outstanding individual, her curating of a network committed to sustaining Walla Walla as trauma informed is truly remarkable. If the currency of this work is hope, then Teri is the Federal Reserve issuing the bank notes!

Teri and her daughter Whitney, fabulous hosts.