Healing-centered work
Interview
Brass Tacks: On Organizational Trauma
Arabella Perez speaks with us about organizational trauma and how best to help teams and organizations move towards healing.
Up With Community
E-Book
Where Does it Hurt? Health and Disharmony in Organizational Ecosystems
Here Ora Grodsky presents a framework for viewing organizational challenges and opportunities within the context of the four layers of organizational ecosystems. All of the layers are living subsystems within the ecosystem. And all living systems require tending over time to maintain or restore health. This framework can be used to understand how the different layers influence each other and the ecosystem as a whole, and to identify and design appropriate interventions to foster, create, or restore organizational harmony.
Ora Grodsky
Blog
Resources with Norma Wong
Norma Wong, an instructor with the Institute of Zen Studies, applies Zen principles in an experiential and secular practice to support individual, organizational and societal change. Her training and application could equally help with your own personal or organizational growth.
Move to End Violence
Podcast
Bessel van der Kolk — How Trauma Lodges in the Body from the On Being podcast with Krista Tippett
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk is an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences. We call this “trauma” when we encounter it in life and news, and we tend to leap to address it by talking. But Bessel van der Kolk knows how some experiences imprint themselves beyond where language can reach. He explores state-of-the-art therapeutic treatments — including body work like yoga and eye movement therapy — and shares what he and others are learning on this edge of humanity about the complexity of memory, our need for others, and how our brains take care of our bodies.
On Being with Krista Tippett
Guide
Guide to Completing the Agency Self-Assessment
The Agency Self-Assessment for Trauma-Informed Care is intended to be a tool that will help you assess your organization’s readiness to implement a trauma-informed approach.
The Trauma Informed Care Project
Toolkit
Family-Care, Community-Care and Self-Care Tool Kit: Healing in the Face of Cultural Trauma
This toolkit, put together by the Association of Black Psychologists and Community Healing Network–developed by and for people of African ancestry–is meant to comfort and inspire in difficult times. It provides resources to help us take care of ourselves and each other, and strengthen our sense of community for the journey ahead.
The Association of Black Psychologists
Resources
Trauma Transformed Tools
This is a set of tools developed by the organization Trauma Transformed, specifically designed for organizations to assess whether their programs and actions follow trauma-informed principles and, if not, to guide them toward more trauma-informed policies.
Trauma Transformed
Toolkit
Breaking Isolation: Self Care and Community Care Tools for our People
This is a personal wellness plan, as well as a set of additional resources, presented by The Audre Lorde Project, to help name the trauma and needs felt by members of the LGBTSTGNC POC community, and to inspire love and resilience to meet those needs.
The Audre Lorde Project
Website
RYSE Center
RYSE creates safe spaces grounded in social justice for young people to love, learn, educate, heal, and transform lives and communities. Check out their website for resources and info about youth programming, antiracism and more.
RYSE Center
Article
Research: The Human Dimensions of Resilience
This summary of a whitepaper by Teri Sivilli posits that the traits of resilient individuals can be learned and taught, and that contemplative practices like meditation and yoga are effective training platforms.
Garrison Institute
Paper
Societal Trauma: Danger and Democracy
In this paper, Bloom looks at overwhelming, repetitive, multigenerational traumatic experiences. These experiences, often ignored in assessments of both human psychology and global politics, are not only self-destructive but, as Bloom advocates, endangering to democracy around the world. Here Bloom argues that it's time to address these repetitive global traumas.
Dr. Sandra L. Bloom, The Politics of Psychotherapy: New Perspectives
Book
Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma-Informed Systems of Care
This is the third book in a trilogy by Dr. Sandra Bloom which explores the effect of trauma on human service organizations and explains how organizations can become trauma informed by using a therapeutic approach called the Sanctuary model.
Dr. Sandra L. Bloom and B. Farragher
Book
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.
Resmaa Menakem
Resource
Racial Rx
Check out the website of Dr. Gail Christopher, a leader on health, wellness, and racial healing. Her comprehensive site may help you discover those requisite elements for personal growth and well-being.
Dr. Gail Christopher
Resource
Move to End Violence
This online community is building a platform to end violence. Their extensive online resources offer tools, practices, and strategies that could help us collectively achieve the social change we seek.
Move to End Violence
Article
What You Need to Know About Sound Healing
Did you know that sound has been used as a tool for physical healing for millenia, from the medicine melodies of indigenous communities of the Americas to the mantras of the Hindu Brahmins? This article explains how sound can be utilized for growth and healing.
MindBodyGreen - Nate Martinez
Media
Sound Healing
Watch as sounds and vibrations are combined with meditations to heal and support the mind, the body, and overall emotional health.
Gaia
TED Talk
The healing power of reading
“Reading also changed our relationship with each other. It gave us an occasion for intimacy, to see beyond our points of view… When you meet somebody as a reader, you meet him for the first time, newly, freshly.” Michelle Kuo’s engaging TED Talk looks at reading and writing as invaluable ways to engage with others and discover more about ourselves.
TED Talk - Michelle Kuo
TED Talk
What if gentrification was about healing communities instead of displacing them?
An architect who spent years planning in and revitalizing the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco, Liz Ogbu discusses “spatial justice,” and the importance of understanding that justice has a geography. Ogbu argues that this understanding is the jumping-off point for viewing the equitable distribution of resources and services as a basic human right.
TED Talk - Liz Ogbu
TED Talk
How we can start to heal the pain of racial division
“We believe[d] that everyone, both black and white, people in the South, could find a redemptive pathway out of the stranglehold of racism that had gripped them for more than 400 years.” This powerful, first-hand account of activism and struggle within the American Civil Rights Movement looks at how we can move on from a long history of division and adversity.
TED Talk - Ruby Sales
Article
Growth After Trauma
Richard G. Tedeschi tells us about how to make sure that we derive something positive from struggle.
Harvard Business Review
Resource
Free Racialized Trauma Course
This course is designed to help identify, acknowledge and heal from racialized trauma, defined as mental and emotional injury caused by encounters with racial bias and ethnic discrimination.
Cultural Somatics Institute
SWITCH PATHWAYS
A problem is a sign of what is blocking our impact or progress—it is the symptom. An issue is the underlying cause of one or more problems that we can directly address. We must take time to fully understand our problems and issues, and the root causes of both in order to choose the most strategic focus for our learning.
Visit this Pathway 
Teams often begin change projects before they have clarified language, aligned their intent, and determined how a change project will connect to their larger strategic goals. Spending more time clarifying frameworks, developing personal and professional commitment to change, as well as better understanding the outcomes of the project will set a stronger foundation for success.
Visit this Pathway 
We often try to solve a problem without understanding it fully. This is like performing surgery on someone’s leg without understanding how their heart works. Understanding the challenges we’re trying to tackle, and understanding better the world around us, is similarly integral to our change-making efforts.
Visit this Pathway 
Major strategic initiatives need the solid foundation of a healthy organization to flourish. This includes effective internal communications, focused decision-making, useful performance evaluation, life-giving management, and conflict resolution.
Visit this Pathway 
Breaking the status quo and opening up new possibilities for equity and freedom in our work requires innovative experiments. Teams must ensure that all members have the ability to act on the vision and goals they are co-creating.
Visit this Pathway 
Our minds cannot move toward racial justice, equity or transformation if our bodies are not prepared for change. This pathway offers those preparations that we have found most beneficial to adult learning.
Visit this Pathway 
Explore the interviews, frameworks, templates and articles created and published by Up With Community.Visit this Pathway GROW COMMUNITY
Giving thanks: We share these resources in gratitude to all of our teachers and with appreciation for the value they have brought us. The field guide is a living resource that we are consistently adding to. We receive no payment or kickbacks for sharing. Access and use of these resources should be done at one’s own discretion. If you see a resource you like, we encourage you to reach out to the author.
Have a resource to add? We are always looking to expand the resources we can share. If you have a tool/resource/link you would like to share with UWC and its partners, please email us: research@upwithcommunity.org.
Ready to learn?
If it’s time to transform your team so they can transform the world, let’s connect.