- Good evening.
- [Voiceover] Good evening.
- Thank you.
My name is Hye-Kyung Kang and I'm a resident faculty member
here at the Smith College School for Social Work.
I'd like to welcome you to this year's anti-racism lecture.
The annual anti-racism lecture is a part of our school's
continuous effort to becoming an anti-racism institution.
I'd like to give you a little context
about our anti-racism commitment.
Although the Smith College School for Social Work
has long envisioned itself as committed
to an anti-racism stance, both in our policy
and programming, the school has recognized
that there was a very low enrollment of students of color
in the late 1980s.
This recognition led to a serious assessment
of the institution, which was led
by the alumni of color
conference at that time.
The conference generated sweeping proposals
addressing all levels of institutional practices
to help the school progress towards its anti-racism stance.
In addition, School for Social Work students,
in the early 1990s, further pushed the school's progress,
which culminated in 1994, when the school
made an official commitment
to becoming an anti-racism institution
by formally adopting its anti-racism commitment statement.
You can see the statement in our website.
This commitment brought many changes in ongoing efforts
in all aspects of the institution,
including student recruitment, staff and faculty hiring,
curriculum, school policies and programming,
and other institutional practices.
Also, structures have been established to track progress
toward our commitment involving all faculty,
administrators, and staff.
So this annual anti-racism lecture
is part of this overall effort.
This year's lecture, Healing Trauma, Restoring Community,
Trauma, Race, and Social Work in the Urban Context
explores race and class and the current narrative
surrounding trauma-informed practice,
particularly in urban contexts,
in how social workers and other practitioners
can partner with communities
to bring healing and social change.
I am thrilled to introduce to you
tonight's speaker, Dr. Troy Harden.
Dr. Harden currently serves as the co-director
for the institute of, for Youth and Community Engagement
at Chicago State University,
where he is an assistant professor
within its MSW program.
He is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago's
MSW program,
and received his doctorate from DePaul University's
School of Education.
Dr. Harden's research and work include
critical urban youth studies,
the intersection of education and community
in innovative programming, and public health.
Dr. Harden has over 25 years' experience
serving and consulting in social service,
education, and community settings.
He has worked as a commission, administrator,
educator, community practitioner, and activist
concerning community issues.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Troy Harden.
(applause)
- Good evening.
How's everybody feeling?
Excellent, excellent.
I'm really really excited to be here.
Really honored to be here.
So I'd just like to first thank Dr. Kang
and the Smith College School of Social Work
for inviting me out.
It's really a privilege, an honor,
any time I get an opportunity to share
any of my work, so I'm really humbled
by the opportunity to come here.
You all do some amazing work here.
And what I know about many social work students, as well,
is that you often come from very rich backgrounds
and traditions of working in community
and serving people and getting outside of yourself,
so it's always an honor to be amongst kindred spirits
and amongst friends.
I have to say
that I really also like this town.
It's really nice, a nice quaint town,
right, it's really cool.
And I really wanted to get here like a day in advance
to really soak up.
Today, I just got here about three or four hours ago, maybe.
And so my flight was scheduled to leave
last night at six o'clock.
I really wanted, I'm a father of two young children,
I really wanted to be at home for Father's Day,
and so my plan was to leave at six last night,
but the flight got delayed,
so on the way to the airport, I got the news
that the flight was delayed.
And as it goes, I had a connecting flight
from Chicago to Detroit and then here into Hartford,
and so I wouldn't be able to catch the connecting flight.
So, you know, on the way home,
I'm on the phone, I'm talking,
I'm negotiating this stuff, and my daughter,
my six-year-old daughter's in the car with me.
And she's listening, overhearing my conversation,
she's listening to my conversation
and I'm doing all these things
where I'm trying to make sure I get a flight to get here
this morning.
And so she says, after I get off the phone,
she says, Daddy.
I'm like, what?
She says,
I have a solution.
And I'm thinking, Okay, solution.
Solution to what?
She said, To your flight problem.
I said, I said, What?
She said, Well you're giving a presentation,
you're supposed to give a presentation, right?
I said, Yeah,
She said, Well, you can give a presentation
to my stuffed animals instead, right?
(audience laughs)
So.
So, you know, look,
no shame in my game, I have no problems
presenting to stuffed animals.
So, you know.
But it's really nice to be here with you all, you know.
Now, I do need to say that Mr. Fluffy
and Miss Stuffy are much harder, tougher audiences
than you are, so I think it's all downhill from here.
Great preparation.
But I'm really excited to be here.
Any time I speak,
whether that's in the classroom
or doing a talk, I always start with giving some honor,
an homage to people who came before me,
my ancestors.
I truly stand on the shoulders of my parents
and also my grandparents and great-grandparents,
and those who came before me, going all the way back
to the continent.
And also acknowledge that there are many many people
behind me whose voice speaks through mine.
You don't see them, but they're there with me today.
And so it's really critically important for me
to really consider,
are the words that come out of my mouth
acceptable to the people who came before me,
my ancestors, my actions as well.
And so, I thought it appropriate to start
with a little quote, right?
So those of you know, this is a recent ancestor,
one of my recent ancestors, right?
Ruby Dee, the actress and activist made transition
just a few days ago.
I'm sure many of you heard about it.
I've always been a long fan of her.
And about 12, 15 years ago, I had the oppotunity
to hear her and her husband Ossie Davis speak
in Chicago.
And one of the things that they were talking about,
naturally, a lot of people really admired
their marriage and stuff, and so they were talking
and people were asking questions about their marriage.
So, she came out with this quote.
When somebody asked about love, and she said
Love is passion clothed in infinite patience.
And I thought, what a, such a profound statement.
If you've been married for a long time,
you definitely understand it, right?
But I think in this context, it comes from a different place
and a different space associated with this idea of love.
The ethic of love.
We don't talk about enough in social work, I think,
about this thing called love, right,
in terms of loving the work, loving the people we work with,
and having passion about the work that we do.
But also understanding the need for patience with ourselves,
with the work.
It takes time, the willingness to dig and struggle,
it takes time.
And so, I felt that was important.
And I'm also reminded
of a book that Dr. King wrote so many years ago.
Why We Can't Wait, right?
You know, that talked about the urgency
of struggle and the things we need to do.
So, I'm reminded, and I think, contextually,
I think about this idea of patience, ethical or pedagogy
of patience, but also persistence, right?
Is that we both need to be patient, you know,
and understand that with each other
and as we do the work, but also this idea
of persistent, that persistent struggle and staying with it
and staying with the work.
So I'm also thrilled to be here
and talking about this idea of anti-racism.
My work is grounded in anti-racist work.
I don't speak it all the time.
It's how I live, right?
I might speak more about being more pro,
pro-African American, pro-black,
all those kinds of things,
but ultimately, the work is grounded,
I'm pro-humanist, for that matter,
but my work is grounded in that sense.
And so I've been doing a lot of anti-racist work,
anti-sexist work, you know, for a number of years,
both in Chicago and around the world.
And I've done a lot of training, all that kind of stuff.
But I wanna tell a quick story about a friend of mine.
His name, I'll call him Tom.
And Tom and I have been friends about 20 years.
Tom is white.
He's conservative, and he's wealthy, right?
And so, and I pitched it, you know me,
I'm kind of the opposite.
I'm black, I'm progressive, and, well, not so much wealthy,
that's a whole other thing.
But that's Tom, right.
That's me and Tom.
So Tom, Tom and I, just to picture,
we do work together.
Tom is committed to service,
he's committed to community development,
so he's engaged in a lot of community efforts
around Chicago and nationally,
and even internationally.
And so we have very pointed, honest,
and very intimate conversations about race,
and about class, and about justice.
You know, we talk about every subject under the sun.
We hold each other accountable.
And we love each other, that's my guy.
You know, and so, we can talk about anything.
So recently, we've been doing some work together.
And about a month ago, Tom and I were having lunch.
And Tom said, You know.
And he was talking about some work we were doing
with some African American males,
with some African American social workers
and some young men in the city,
this mentoring program.
I'll talk a little more about that later.
But part of the idea is really being able to expose
young people to positive guys,
and so it's important for us to have
social work men of color in the work that we do.
And so Tom was kinda critiquing that.
He said, You know, I think this is my racist self speaking.
But I wonder whether or not it's always best to have,
you know, these guys exposed just to social workers, right?
You know, and I'm looking at Tom and I'm like,
Well my black friends might not have a problem with that,
but my social work friends might whip your ass, right?
They might come after you, you know.
So we have those kind of conversations,
we talk like that, and we ultimately come to,
you know, we move the needle in our work relationship
and our work, you know, in terms of our work together.
And I wanted to enter there, because for Tom and I,
we don't get a pass.
Neither one of us get a pass in the work, you know.
With all the years of work and struggle I do,
and with whatever he does and what he's trying to do.
I don't let up.
We love each other, but I don't let up.
And so the invitation is, in this space today,
that no one gets a pass, that no matter, you know,
what work you do, or what you've done,
or how many times you went to an anti-racist lecture,
or how African-centered you might be.
Whatever it might be, no one gets a pass.
That we can love each other enough to be able
to tell the truth about the work and struggle together.
And I say, I don't get a pass myself.
I'm constantly a work in progress.
When I work with young people, I think about adultism,
and I think about how I age out everyday, right?
I get a little bit older every day.
I get a little bit more out of touch every day,
so my struggle, you know, it has to continue every day.
And so it's almost like a 12 step program.
You know, in AA it's one day at a time, right?
You know, with this struggle called racism
and classism and sexism in our work,
it is truly a one day at a time process,
'cause it is constantly evolving.
The oppressiveness constantly evolves,
so the work must evolve.
So I wanted to enter into that conversation
of truth-saying, truth-speaking, and truth-telling,
because that's the context of the work that we do.
In Chicago, we really find that to be important
and critical to our work.
In that way, I'm almost like Diogenes, right?
You know, I continue to seek, like Diogenes sought
the honest man, you know, I continue to seek somebody
in this country who hasn't been infected by
the scourge of racism.
If you were born in this country, in particular.
Maybe not so much outside,
but particularly if you were born,
we were all, you know, impacted by this.
So this work is about moving to this place, ultimately,
of freedom associated with that.
So, a little bit about some of my work.
This is a little bit about Project Mentor.
About 10 years ago, we received funding
from the Department of Health and Human Services
to launch a program,
it was a holistic health mentoring program.
And we grounded our work in several principles,
naturally, positive youth development
and some of those kind of things, you know,
but also really having a strong, affirmative cultural space.
You'll see me somewhere in the back,
trying to look hard like that.
Right, you know.
But we did a lot of circle work.
We did a lot of work in terms of peace-building
with young people in Chicago.
It was co-ed, young men and women.
We found something interesting.
We did a randomized trial, so it was kind of
the gold standard of research associated with it.
Our program showed some mixed results.
For the more high-achieving young people,
we didn't see much of a bump.
So these are the young people who are already
headed to college and were doing,
already doing some good work.
They might already be engaged in different activities,
playing sports, all that kind of stuff.
So we didn't see much of a change.
They didn't get much worse, they didn't get worse at all.
They didn't get much better, though.
They had more relationships, which is interesting,
but they didn't have some other stuff.
But for our more, what we so call at risk young people,
young people who were struggling a little bit,
the young people in street organizations,
the young people who might have been teetering
on being in school or not.
They had the significant transformation within the context
of the program.
And so we still knew that we were onto something
in terms of how we set up our work.
So just a little context about the set-up of the work.
I'm a social worker, as Dr. Kang illustrated.
I've been doing a lot of different types of work
for a long time.
Clinical work , administrative work, I run programs,
policy work, all that kind of stuff.
Several years ago, in the early,
I started out just doing clinical work.
I was trained in psychoanalytic therapy,
and really digging in, you know,
with some of my clients.
I had a client, I'll call him Michael.
And Michael was from Cabrini Green.
For those who don't know, Cabrini Green
was a public housing space in Chicago.
It's notoriously famous for Good Times and Candy Man.
You know, a lot of people thought Candy Man
was out back in the day, right?
You all know about Candy Man?
I got it, all right, all right.
So it's been up and down,
but again, it's been a space, it's a contested space,
and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second.
So Michael was referred to me
through the probation department.
Michael had shot his best friend by accident.
He was 14 years old, he was in eighth grade
at a school called Sojourner Truth.
And he had did a little bit of time
in juvenile detention center, and then he was referred home
and then he was referred to me.
So I started seeing Michael and,
in true social work form, I met him where he was at.
I didn't, my office was in Lincoln Park,
so Michael wasn't gonna come to Lincoln Park
just to picture Lincoln Park, it's probably the wealthiest
area, neighborhood in Chicago,
and it's really walking distance from Cabrini Green.
More about the segregation in Chicago later,
but that's, you know, part of the context.
So I would go meet Michael at his house,
I would go to the school, we'd go to the basketball court.
We did all these things.
And Michael, on the exterior, presented very tough,
very hard, right?
He was a member of a street organization, all that stuff.
But in session, Michael was very emotional,
very reflective, talked a lot about
what he had experienced,
the shooting, the nightmares he was having
based on the shooting.
The family of the young man who was shot,
he was paralyzed from the neck down.
The family of the young man, they didn't enact revenge
upon Michael physically, but they did emotionally, right?
And so they constantly drove at Michael,
the constantly, when they saw him in the streets,
you know, they, you know, made threats to him
and they talked about him.
The eighth grade graduation, when it's very celebratory
in Chicago for a lot of reasons, but it's a big celebration.
They taunted Michael when he went across the stage.
So this is what he was experiencing.
So he talked about this trauma that he was experiencing,
this PTSD.
So I saw Michael all the way from roughly, let's say January
of his eighth grade year up until the summer.
Michael was getting ready to enter high school,
he entered Lincoln Park High School, oddly enough.
Lincoln Park is an interesting school.
Michael's in special education, and what they would do
with the special ed students is that they would place them
in the basement, you know, of the school, right?
So there's problems with that.
And so, again, I would see Michael,
and we agreed that I would start seeing him at the school.
Well, I went to school on the first day,
I went to school on the second day, they said,
We can't make this happen.
I kept going back for almost three months
and I never got to see Michael,
and I never saw Michael again.
And so, my work, in a lot of ways, became about
searching for Michael, in some ways,
but also recognizing that the work I had to do
was beyond the individual, beyond the interpersonal.
That I had to be able to deal with these structures,
these institutions, as the both/and.
They're no longer either/or for me.
There's a both/and in terms of the work
that is inherently if I choose to work
with the individual, you know, in that one to one setting,
or even in the small group setting.
Ultimately I need to deal with the structures
and institutions that he or she are dealing with, right?
And I swore at that point that we would begin that process.
So when we started Project Mentor and I'll move on
to our other process, which is called Full Circle,
we inherently began this process of doing the both/and
of our work.
And constantly reinforcing and asking questions
around what that is.
So often, funders or even instructors and professors
and academics and researchers, we often attempt
to pigeon-hole the people who do practice work
into one or the other.
Are you doing organizing work
or are you doing one to one therapy?
Do you have an intervention that works with this group,
or are you trying to change policy?
Which one is it?
And somehow the two don't always mix.
And so we knew we had to be able to affirm
that this Full Circle was our next project,
but we dealt with young men in street organizations
who, it's so-called violence prevention,
but the idea, you know, was to get them engaged
in leadership in their communities.
So this was a social marketing project.
This was some of the work they did,
where they designed, you know, different marketing pieces
to really try to demonstrate another affirmative space
in their community.
So this billboard, if you were in Chicago
a couple years ago, on the west side of Chicago,
around Chicago Pulaski, you would have seen
this sign up.
This is some of the young men in our program.
They actually created this and designed this.
They did participatory action research,
a group that a lot of people feel,
you know they can't understand research,
they don't know how to think about some kind of things
where they researched their community,
things about their community, present it,
those kind of things.
And so we knew we were really onto something
about creating a unique space around the work that we do.
So this led to an opportunity that came up
a couple years ago.
I was doing work with one of my colleagues,
Dr. Kimberly Mann.
And Dr. Mann is a professor in our department,
but she also heads our state's child welfare system's
trauma inform project.
They are responsible for training every one in the state
around trauma-informed practice,
state of Illinois.
And so she designed curriculum, works in that work.
And so she was interested in talking with me more
about trauma-informed work.
At the time, I was really trying to stay away
from violence work, because, you know, violence,
as much and as important as it is, can sometimes
get sexy amongst researchers,
and so people try to chase the dollars
and everybody wants to do something around violence.
So I really tried to stay away from that.
The problem was, in both our programs,
in Project Mentor as well as in Full Circle,
all the young people kept telling me,
you know we do all these interventions,
and for example, we work on some of the drug use,
the drug use around marijuana use
and say, Why you smokin' so much marijuana?
'Cause I'm so stressed out, right?
And we worked on issues of obesity and nutrition
and said, Why are you eating so much?
Why are you not working out?
Why are you not going outside to play?
Because it's so violent and I'm so stressed out, right?
So they were constantly coming back
to this idea of the stress and this persistent stress
that they were dealing with.
And so I knew we needed to do something to unpack this issue
and to do it in a progressive and a rich way.
So, just a little bit about the context of violence.
You see, that's a Safe Passage sign.
So Chicago has gotten such
that we need these signs up
to let people know that you can go this way to school.
This is some of the stuff we're dealing with.
And so those signs, the flowers,
and I know it's not so different as many urban centers,
but these are some of the things that we're dealing with.
So our aim at Project Mentor was one,
to prevent and reduce violence in Chicago through supporting
young people in addressing the impact of trauma
on young people and families in their neighborhoods
and communities, but also develop new strategies
for trauma and violence prevention and reduction, right?
And so, you know, really, stand in the mill.
We wanted to reduce and take a stab at reducing
some of the violence in our community,
but also really have some new strategies around trauma.
Just to share a little bit about that, too,
is that much of the work that Dr. Mann was involved in
and even some of the rhetoric associated
with the National Childhood Traumatic Stress Network
and Illinois Childhood Traumatic Stress,
was engaged in, was mostly geared towards
the child welfare system and young people in that.
It was important, but it didn't really get at
some of the community issues.
We also recognize, too, that even when people
were talking about the community issues,
they weren't dealing with the structural inequities issue.
Some of the conditions that would create
some of these pieces.
And so we knew we had to begin the process
of addressing something.
So we came up with a trans-disciplinary process
through our social work department,
our communications media arts and theater department,
counseling, as well as other CSU faculty,
students, and then our several community partners,
we designed this program called Truth 'n Trauma.
Ultimately, you know, dealing with the truth and trauma.
That's what we call it.
Just some more context about Chicago, too.
Just this past Easter, we had 45 people shot
over the course of a weekend.
30 people were shot last week over the course
of the weekend, a similar number.
So it's pretty consistent.
We usually have between 20 and 30 people who are shot
in Chicago during the course of a weekend.
If you can see this, there are little dots,
show you during the course of a six-month period,
the amount of people who were shot, you know.
So those, the little dots, and they're concentrated
mainly in two areas.
One, south, south of that Chicago, the word Chicago,
is the south side of Chicago.
And then just west and northwest is what's considered
the west side of Chicago.
There's some smattering up north,
but ultimately much of it is concentrated
on the south and the west sides of Chicago.
And again, to start thinking about
these larger issues and the connections,
this is actually, one of the issues we've dealt with
in Chicago, as well, is school closings.
It's becoming a national phenomenon around the closing
of public schools.
we had, last year we had almost 50 public schools close
at one time, during the course of one year,
which is unprecedented.
Anywhere in the country.
I would argue anywhere in the world,
but particularly anywhere in the U.S.
The only, I think, other district that had that many schools
close was New Orleans in Katrina.
And just on a side note, I recently heard
there are only like a couple of public schools
actually left in New Orleans now after all of 'em
are becoming privatized, are becoming charter schools.
And so that's a phenomenon that's national.
I'll talk more about that later,
but if you can see, notice the dots,
they're in the similar places.
They're in some of the same places
where we have a lot of shootings.
This cluster area here,
that's actually where Cabrini Green was.
That was Michael's school, Sojourner Truth.
And so just to give you some context about it.
And so we also see, this is actually school closing
and community foreclosure rates.
So we also talk about the connection between housing
and schools closing, and then also the violence too.
So there's an explicit attack, right,
that many argue is happening in many of our communities
around the poor, and also the people of color.
And we also know, similar to many other urban centers,
the racial disparity in terms of education,
and also the prison pipeline is also quite huge, right?
So, these are the things and the context
that we're dealing with associated with that.
And we also understand, too, that violence isn't just
about Chicago, it's also part of our national conversation.
It's a part of our national context,
and so we ask the question, are we, you know,
part of a culture of violence?
The larger reinforcement, you know,
of violent conditions around our world.
And so, as we enter the one to one discourse
associated with violence, right, and people exposed to it,
impacted, we also have to keep in the back
of our minds, this larger national obsession
that we have as a country associated with it.
You all feeling me a little bit?
Y'all with me?
Okay, all right, just checking, right.
So this is what we're dealing with, you know, in Chicago.
I also wanna give another quick context too
to the national conversation that's a part of a framing
of our work.
You know, it is this idea, you know,
of also the value of black life, right?
You know, there's this challenge.
We know Trayvon, right?
Oscar Grant, also was somebody who was shot, you know,
in a similar fashion as Trayvon.
And so, their lives matter, and the young people
who we deal with and we see who are shot and killed,
their lives matter.
But even those who are still struggling,
their lives matter.
And we always, we ask that question often,
in the work that we do, particularly amongst the brothers,
we ask this question a lot amongst ourselves,
you know, what is the value of black life
and the work that we do?
And how do we, you know, really bring
the conversation forward, you know,
to really promote a healing not just for ourselves,
but also for this larger country and continue
this discourse associated with the work.
So it's in that context that we also think about, you know,
for these, for the young men we deal with,
you know, even our president doesn't escape
from this national assault, right?
You know, this is of course, these are just some terms
that we talk about, you know, in the context
of black men, you know, this idea of scripting,
you know, where black men are exotic and strange,
violent, incompetent and under-educated,
hyper-sexual, exploitable, right?
And like I said, even our president can't escape
this kind of onslaught, right?
So, if our president can't escape it,
what makes us think that our young people can, right?
And then what kind of work do we have to do
that we have to commit to ourselves
to really transform, you know, the way we work with,
the way we support our young people in the world.
Y'all with me still, right?
All right, so let's keep moving.
So our TNT project,
we have 40 young people, high school aged young people,
ages rough 14 to 18.
You have to be a freshman in high school
or at least that age.
They were selected from the area surrounding Chicago,
just again, to give you a little context around Chicago,
around Chicago State.
We are in the greater Roseland community.
You may have heard about greater Roseland,
about a few years ago, a young man
by the name of Darian Albert
was killed and became a YouTube video,
became viral around that,
actually showed him being killed,
and so there was a lot of national attention
associated with that.
And so, we're right down the street from there.
So many of the young people
actually go to the high school that Darian was at,
as well as come from other schools.
So we had young people from probably about
20 different high schools around that area.
We looked at both traditional and non-traditional leadership
and we had young people who were, you know,
in the president of this particular club
and on the football team and this kind of things.
But we also had young people
who were in street organizations.
We had a young person who got accepted to Harvard.
We had a young person who was a member,
a leader, a lieutenant in one of the street gangs.
We also had a young person, a couple young people,
we had the person, the guy, he was the first-team
all-city quarterback in Chicago,
as well as the all-city wide receiver.
So we had a real rich mix of young people
who were committed, who wanted to work around
this issue, and who wanted to come in and look at doing
this particular work.
Again, you know, I mentioned this idea
of moving outside the box a little bit and the both/and.
If you will, I just want you to consider for a second,
your most powerful and impactful
education experience that you ever had.
This is actually a ice-breaker I do,
so you can take it home, do something with it
if you so choose.
But if you think for a second about your most powerful
educational, impactful educational experience,
for most of us, for many of us, it might not be
in the classroom.
I know those of us who are professors,
we like to believe, that the things that we have to say,
you know, will really impact you and transform you,
but ultimately, I think I remember maybe two words
from my schooling experiencing in social work,
and that was class dismissed, right, you know?
So it was my field experience that became
more of the thing that I come back to
time and time again.
I still look at some of my notes, actually,
from some of my classes, but ultimately,
it was those field experiences.
And so we understand the impact
of an experiential education.
I would argue too, that many of you might have thought
or might have said that if we would just break out in groups
and talk about it a little bit,
that your most powerful educational experience
was also outside of the school completely.
That it happened on the playground,
it happened on a vacation, or it happened, you know,
in a car riding with your mom.
So we understand that powerful experiences
don't always happen within that context.
Now, think for a moment too, about your most powerful
healing experience.
How many of us may argue or would share
that our most powerful healing experience
took place in a 50 minute session, right?
You know?
Maybe it took place, again, on a playground.
Maybe it took place listening to some music.
Maybe it took place in nature, or maybe
it was a process, right?
Ernest Gaines wrote a book called A Lesson Before Dying.
Some of you may be familiar with it.
You may have seen the play, you may have watched the movie.
And in it, the protagonist
was a teacher
who was from the community but kind of not of it, right?
He had came back to kind of teach in this small town
after receiving education and after having become
a little bit more worldly.
There was a young man who was sentenced to death.
And the grandmother of the young man wanted this young man
to learn how to read before he died, right?
And so she reached out to the teacher
and asked the teacher to teach him
before he was killed.
And so he went in, but he didn't know what to do.
He was struggling, his privilege got in the way.
He didn't know how to teach, but he did this powerful work,
just trying to be present and asking himself
some very tough questions.
And also, in the book, the work often took place
outside of the actual teaching session, right?
And so it took place in different environments.
So I wanted to share that before we begin the process
of looking even more at our work,
because we knew that we have to shake up some things.
You know, most of the people that I work with,
they don't like going to therapy, right?
They don't wanna.
We know the myth, sometimes, of people of color
and men, also, associated with
coming to traditional sessions,
so we know we have to shake it up a little bit
and do some more creative things.
Now these young people weren't necessarily
young people who we would seek out
to really provide services for,
but ultimately many of them talk about
a lot of the stress and the trauma
and traumatic experiences that they had in the community
and they did have, a lot of serious pieces happen, right?
We grounded ourself in this idea of restorative practice,
and I'm gonna talk a little bit about that.
So, restorative practice is related to this idea
of restorative justice.
We have heard about restorative justice in different work.
And so, just for some context around restorative justice,
you know, we talk about this idea of criminal justice
and how these problems and challenges
of the criminal justice system.
We also talk with our young people
about street justice, right?
You know, when the criminal justice system doesn't work,
we resort and we rely on street justice.
We handle business on our own, right?
But ultimately, we think that restorative
and even more transformative justice
are critically important.
You know, restorative justice has been known
to lower recidivism rates, you know,
help deal with PTSD and all these kind of things.
But we also knew too that we weren't necessarily
getting at, you know, just trying to deal
with victim and offenders.
Usually, that's the context associated
with restorative justice, it's about really repairing
the damage between the victim and its offender.
We were interested more in the idea
of restorative practices, which look more holistically
at the entire environment that we were dealing with.
How do we create a culture, right, a culture of healing?
How do we do that amongst ourselves, this staff,
this faculty?
How do we do that amongst ourselves and planning?
How do we do that amongst ourselves and working
with young people?
How do we help them create the space,
the transformative space for themselves?
So restorative practices looks at, you know, reducing crime,
but also looks at improving human behavior,
promoting democracy, and the work that we do.
And so we needed to and wanted to ground ourselves
in that philosophy.
So everyone who was a part of our project
went through restorative practice training, right?
They went through peace keeping circle training
and other forms and we talked about it constantly
as we planned, as we did, the work that we did.
And this is just a little model, just to give you some more
understanding of how we began
this idea of restorative, right?
Think about the high piece,
the part on the left looks at this idea of discipline.
At the bottom, a little bit more of support.
And so, whereas that, not giving any type of discipline,
right, is looked at as being too permissive.
But also, just sharing and telling people what to do,
where to go, how to do it.
Not doing any at all is neglectful, right?
Not even responsible.
It's irresponsible.
Being too punitive is what
our common criminal justice system offers, right?
And so it's much more authoritarian.
Restorative is much more about working with,
it's about bringing people together,
it's about really listening, it's about promoting voice
and actualization in the work that we do.
But even with restorative justice and restorative practice
and all that kind of stuff, we also understand
that there are experiences that people have
that transcend, even that work.
I'm reminded of a time where I did an anti-racist training
with the young man who was,
well I did it with a group, but there was a young man there
who was white, and he also talked about this idea
that I don't see color.
Y'all ever heard that before, that I don't see, right?
You know, so he was one of those guys.
He'd say, I don't see, everybody is the same,
and I'm like, I don't know about that, right?
But that was his come from,
and so we can work with that, and we did some of the stuff
around, you know, you deny different people,
and you don't affirm, you know, the fact that all of us
are beautiful, so there's nothing wrong
with being able to see, you know,
race and all that stuff, right?
And so, he kept persisting.
So we do a lot of experiential work, and at some point,
you know, he began to talk about his background.
And the young man was from, his parents
were from Germany.
And it turns out the his grandfather was actually
a member of the S.S.
And his family had came to the country,
had fled that, and so, in his work, it was all about,
look, I don't wanna be associated with that,
you know, I don't wanna deal with that, you know,
I don't wanna talk about that, so yes,
everybody is the same.
He had denied even parts of himself
that could be affirmative.
He didn't even wanna acknowledge the fact
that he had German culture, you know,
and those things are important to him.
You know, and so we worked,
and we talked about it, and he ultimately
did some healing work associated with that, right?
But we also acknowledge that all healing work
can't take place in that restorative circle
with the offender and the victim,
or even the cultural group.
Sometimes we have to do that work separately.
Sometimes men have to do work with men
and women have to do work with women.
Sometimes the work has to be done
with just African Americans, and sometimes we work together.
So, so it's in that context that we did some of our work.
All our young people were trained in restorative practices
and peacekeeping circles, and even facilitating
and dealing with conflict.
Again, we grounded ourselves with the acknowledgment
that sometimes we need to do separate healing
in the work that we did.
We also grounded ourself in what we call
trauma-informed practice.
This is Dr. Kimberly Mann, my colleague.
And so, again, I mentioned Kimberly does a lot
of training with the state around the work that she does.
This is just some definitions around trauma
coming from the NIMH website.
The experience of an event by a child that is mostly painful
or distressful, which often results in lasting mental
or physical effects.
So we created a training for the young people,
and the idea was for them to go out
and actually work with other young people, right?
A youth perspective.
Now, why is this so radical?
'Cause usually we get trained in this,
and ultimately we then do therapy.
Or we then supply services.
We don't talk to them about what trauma is.
We don't talk to them about, you know,
some of the issues associated with it.
We don't talk about what happened with it.
We kind of water all that stuff down.
So we made it youth-friendly, but we also
went in there raw, we didn't dumb it down with them, right?
And so these are just some of the modules that we did
in the training.
Too much, the impact of traumatic events on you.
We had another module about not enough,
meaning not enough service so I don't feel the shame
inherent and associated with trauma.
This idea, I have been changed, how trauma ultimately
impacts and transforms how people are, you know,
and the experience of it.
So we dealt with that.
Part two dealt with this idea of resilience, hope,
and restoration, rebuilding the broken places.
Reconnecting, making a difference, right?
So, we walked them through that process.
Also, all of our staff received all of this trauma-informed
training as well, right?
And so anybody who did any other part of the work,
they also were grounded in these things as well.
I'm gonna go past this, but this is just some of the stuff.
We taught them basic neurobiology.
In other words, the impact of traumatic stress on the brain,
the difference between stress and trauma,
the different types of complex trauma
and how that shows up, the difference
between PTSD and stress, and all that kind of stuff.
So we did all that kind of work with them.
And of course, the three Es of trauma,
the event, the experience, the effects, right?
We talked a lot about that in context.
And what we really wanted to do was for them
to have a sense of ownership around the material,
but also to contextualize it, associated with the work
that they were doing.
I'm gonna pass this, but this is just our,
what we also reiterated with our staff.
We were very sensitive to the fact that even young people
who might show up as being amazingly resilient,
suddenly, when we begin to talk about
some of these issues, they may have different events
that emerge, and we saw that happen.
And so, how do we prepare ourselves as staff,
both those of us who are trained as clinicians
and social workers, and those of us who aren't, right,
in the work we do.
We also grounded ourself in this idea
of a culturally-centered practice, right?
There's a West African word, a Ghanaian word
called sankofa, right?
Which simply means understand the past and move forward.
Go back and fetch it, is the literal word.
It's a Ghanaian, a Kan word.
Ghana's playing the U.S. right now, soccer, right?
You know, side note.
So, so we,
so we felt that it was critical to affirm that
and understand that in terms of the work that we do.
This idea of self-reflection and positionality.
You know, Patricia Hill Collins talks about this idea
of, you know, intersection, right?
So we really looked at how race and gender and class
intersected with who we were and how we brought that
to the equation, ultimately how we work,
and even our young people, how they operated
around those things and had a lot of conversations
with the about identity and what does it mean
to be a black youth.
What does it mean to be African American?
What does it mean to be African descended?
What does it mean to be female, woman, man,
all those kind of things.
Gay, straight, other, right?
Identify community stakeholders in the historical political
context of community.
We feel this was historically this critically important
in the work that we do.
I mentioned working in Cabrini.
One of the things that I did, I was running a community
health center, and I had to go in and talk
with some of the elders in the community,
what we call a local advisory board in the public housing.
When I went in to talk to them, the first thing they said,
I was working for DePaul University at the time.
The first thing they said was, isn't DePaul coming
to take our community, you know?
Tear our buildings down?
And I didn't know the answer to that question, right?
And so all I could say is, I need to go back and check.
And the answer was no, they weren't,
but the reality was that threat was there, right?
Mindy Fullilove wrote a book called Root Shock.
If you haven't read it, I think it's an important read.
Because in it, she talks about the traumatic experience
associated with displacement in housing,
and what happens associated with that.
So understanding history in a community
is critically important and very unreported, right?
And again, understanding these larger structural forces,
I mentioned about schools, about housing, about education.
We impact, you know, a lot of those kind of things.
We also worked around this idea of youth-adult partnerships.
Really understanding what that meant
from a positive youth development perspective.
How that might be different in an African American context.
Which I think is different.
So we did all these things.
They did research, we trained them on research methods.
So we have four major groups.
One was this idea of working and creating a trauma workshop
or primary presentation.
We were careful not to call it a training, right?
Another group actually did, conducted their own
research study.
Another group created a theater product.
And another group actually did all filming.
They did a lot of media stuff
and so they were involved in that.
And we did some other things within the context of that.
And you can see a little bit
of the theater group in practice.
They went out, they did trauma presentations.
They worked individually, they worked in schools.
They did, the theater, they created a wonderful,
amazing theater piece.
They had social media that they did.
They did research, advocacy stuff, they did teach-ins.
So they did a lot of really wonderful work.
I'm gonna show you a little clip about the work.
It's only about a minute long,
and it just shows some of the things
that they were doing and some of the activities
that they were engaged in.
Let's see if we can pull it up.
Here we go.
Ah, we don't have any sound.
We did a lot of work to get sound.
All right.
Where's my tech person?
Nope.
She's gone?
Okay.
All right.
So we gonna keep moving
and I'll just try to talk through it.
So.
They were able to,
like I say, we filmed a lot of the work that we did.
There we go.
Now it's not showing up at all.
All right, so, we filmed a lot of work that we did,
and maybe we can show a clip later
once they find a tech person.
But one of the things that we were able to do,
we tried to catch a lot of footage of the work,
but also get them to show a little bit of that,
so some of the footage you were getting ready to see
was some of the work that they had did
and just some general pieces about this.
This is an August Wilson quote.
I wanted to just highlight really quick,
that also grounded our work.
August says that you can confront the dark parts
of yourself and work to banish them with illumination
and forgiveness.
Your willingness to wrestle with your demons
will cause your angels to sing.
Use your pain as this fuel, as a reminder of your strength.
That's August Wilson, the great Pulitzer playwright,
and also an ancestor, right?
We grounded our work with this idea
of creating this transformative, space, you know
for people to heal and the work.
We also look at healing and this idea of healing
not just as a, again, an individual thing.
It's also an inherently political act.
Probably Fereddi said that social workers, right,
that we have to think about our work as a political act,
you know, seeking out, you know, this idea
of a democratic ideal.
So even within the context of a healing space,
you know, and the transformative space,
we think about this idea of advocacy, what it means
around, you know, how black bodies are marginalized
in the world, and ultimately what it means to reclaim
agency and identity and the work that you would do
inherently in that.
What voice, the power and the beauty of restorative practice
and restorative justice is that it brings voice
to people who may not have always exercised that.
And so what we saw was very powerful voices emerge
from our young people, you know, by being able
to create an egalitarian space in the work that we do.
That transferred over into many other facets
of their lives in terms of the work that they were doing.
So that became a critical piece.
We use the arts, also, as a strong and powerful place
to really demonstrate the level of work.
You know, this is just showing some of the pieces.
The theater professor who worked with them
used theater of the oppressed, you know,
by Augusto Boal and his work, you know,
and really grounding their work.
And so you can see, you know, they're using some movement
and it's all about, you know, mindfulness
and group unity and those kind of things.
We also talk a lot about this idea of radical healing.
What does that mean?
Both to transformative justice, you know, the connection
between the prion-industrial complex and schooling
and ultimately the impact.
The young people started a campaign called CPS Bully.
That's Chicago Public School Bully.
And they kind of flipped the switch on traditional bullying,
right, you know we think about bullying,
we think about, you know, there's a bully and he's beating
up on the weaker kid.
Well they look at it, sometimes institutions bully.
Right?
You know, sometimes it's the schools
that are doing that.
And so when you talk about
these heightened surveillance states
that many of our young people are witnessing,
we go through schools, and I don't know about out here,
but we got metal detectors, and then we got security police,
Chicago police in our hallways.
They're constantly under surveillance,
constantly dealing with micro-aggressions on a daily basis
associated with that.
This constant assault.
We looked at the global to local connection.
So, again, we talk about the shooting
and everybody laments that, but how are these guns
getting into our communities, right?
Where they coming from?
How can we have these conversations about that?
You know, so we brought that into the space.
We do ritual and cultural affirmation.
We are unapologetically black in the space that we work
to create, right?
And so we really move into the affirmative about the work
in terms of identity and development,
but also really talking explicitly, so everybody
across the board, whether you black, white, Asian, Latino,
it doesn't matter, you come in this space,
you claim who you are, and you speak that peace.
We looked at different faith perspectives
associated with healing, whether that was Christian
or Islam, you know, or even indigenous African religions.
What does it mean from the spiritual side of it?
Sometimes we shy away from those pieces,
but we know in many of our communities,
that's where people go to get healing,
so how can we understand that?
We looked at the body and things like yoga
and mindfulness practice and how these methods.
We did yoga together and we did those kind of things
to work through.
We did asset mapping, for example,
and the research on healing spaces in the community beyond,
you know, what are the healing spaces?
Where does a young person go to get what he or she needs.
You know, are there healing spaces, right?
And they talked about everything from the barber shop
to the laundry mat, you know, and when you think about it,
'cause a laundry mat, right?
You know a laundry mat is a space where you gotta sit there
and you be there, and so families go there,
and they sit, and they're together,
and they talk and they laugh and they do whatever, right?
So there's all these different type of spaces
that they identify, you know, around that,
and so again, we were looking
at some of those kind of things.
This was a little bit on an advocacy campaign.
It, you know, they were talking about, you know,
this is a little public announcement and it says,
Trauma, it seemed so far away until it arrived
right at your front porch.
So in other words, you think, you know,
about child soldiers in this piece outside,
but actually it's in your community, you know,
and actually, even if you are
living in a faraway suburb, it's still,
the violence is still very much there.
And so, kind of thinking about that.
I don't know if it's gonna come up,
but I was just gonna show, maybe not necessarily a clip,
but one of our, that's actually Dennis Johnson.
You saw him, now he's gone, right?
He was one of our young persons, right?
And Dennis, let me tell you about Dennis.
Dennis was one of them young people who,
we didn't, he was on his way, he was graduating
from high school, and he didn't have a college to go to.
We saw him, I recognized his talent, his energy,
and pulled him in.
We started him, we got him in college,
and eventually he became a strong advocate
for not just the work that we do,
but also the work and the issues in general.
That was Dennis.
Dennis was on Melissa Harris-Perry's show that day.
he's been on it a few times.
And some other shows, and he's got a hell of a quote.
I don't know if I'll be able to pull it up, but.
No, I'm not gonna be able to pull it up,
but the quote is, he said,
We won't, We won't have peace in our communities because,
until you learn how to make a profit from peace, right?
You know.
And so, I think that's what he was talking about
on that show.
Dennis is an amazing young man.
Dennis actually, just again to talk about his work.
Eventually, I said, we got him in school,
and now, through the work he was able to,
he just got accepted to University of Michigan's
Urban Planning Program with a full ride, right?
So we're real excited about his work and what he's doing.
Couldn't get him social work, you know, but
he's still doing it, you know?
And that's just a demonstration.
A lot of times, we talk about, in these diversity channels
about, you hear people talk about,
I can't find any talented people,
but, you know, the reality is
there are hundreds and thousands of Dennis's out there,
you know, doing the work.
Just a little bit about our research evaluation.
We did multiple methods of evaluation
where we looked at interviews, we did surveys,
we did an empowerment survey.
We saw a lot of, we did a pre- and post,
and also a program control group.
We couldn't do a randomized trial because of timing,
but we saw positive change in relation to skills,
use of arts, self esteem, attitudes about self.
Staff really talked about this idea
of the trauma-informed
practice being very strong and powerful in the context
of the work that we were doing.
And also about the restorative practices
in creating an environment and a context
that really became a transformative space.
You know, where young people really became change agents
before their very eyes.
And they looked, at the bottom, I think, is the key quote.
This idea of not a service or a mental health activity,
but something that was really liberative
in healing the community.
They understood there was mental health stuff there,
but ultimately, this idea of liberation
became a very strong part of what we did.
Staff became less judgmental and also really internalized
a lot of the process.
Talked about, you know, this idea of really understanding
even the deeper way and things that our young people
are dealing with.
And they saw young people even become more trusting
and supportive, more responsive,
increased critical thinking, all these things
in terms of the work.
This is just a quote from one of the young persons.
He says, Now I see gang-related violence as something
that could hurt people in different ways.
It's not just about the gangs itself,
it affects everybody around it.
It even affects the person that's doing it.
The people who oppress people also oppress themselves.
So it affects everybody and me knowing about trauma
helped me to pick what's going on with gangs, right?
So the deeper critical analysis, even of young people,
because sometimes young people can be really critical
of other young people, you know.
Why'd you do that?
You know, I don't wanna be bothered with you.
But really understanding the healing
that needs to take place within that.
I'm gonna wrap up and just really talk about, you know,
this quote right here.
You know, this is Maya Angelou.
She says, Courage may be the most important
of all virtues because without it,
one cannot practice any other virtue
with any consistency, right?
So within the context of the work we do,
you know, we believe it takes courage to do
this very hard work, this very tough work,
you know, that we talk about what we do.
I'm not gonna be able to actually,
we're not gonna hear this video, but this is actually
just showing you a little bit of the theater.
Unfortunately.
Is it gonna play?
Yeah, it's supposed to be playing.
So in their work, they're actually doing something,
a particular technique that really,
almost like a sculpture, but not quite.
It's like a staging process called tableaus
where they create a particular frame or pose
based on your own story, based on your own reality.
And so, the young people were able to actually
write their own play using their own journals.
It became a very powerful story, a very powerful way
of telling a story about themselves.
And I really wish you could see it,
'cause it's really dope, right?
But in it, they weave every part of the work that we do,
from the structural work, you know, to talking about issues
such as gossip, and ultimately gossip impacts,
you know, their lives and the work that they do.
And so, in that sense, you know, we really honor
the work that they did, and really lift up, you know,
the struggle inherent that, you know,
we have to continue to do.
Gwendolyn Brooks, the poet laureate,
once said that writing is like a delicious agony, right?
You know, that you suffer through it
and you don't always know, if you tell the truth,
you don't know if it's gonna be good,
if people wanna hear it, and ultimately the impact of that.
And I think social work is a lot like that, right?
It's kind of like a delicious agony,
that we love it, we love to help, we love to support,
but we don't always know the outcome in it,
but in the struggle we must stay, right?
And in the struggle we must work, you know.
So I continue to be committed to this work.
Again, I wish I could've showed you the video stuff,
you know, as life happens, you know.
It's just me talking, but it's all good.
So I really appreciate you all listening
and sharing, and thank you all for having me here.
(applause)
- Thank you, Dr. Harden.
We'll have some time for Q and A's,
and what I'd like to do
is to do a reflection Q and A,
or I call that my funk style Q and A, I think it was that.
So, we are a relationally oriented school,
so when we are asking questions, even,
we want to build relation.
But what I'd like folks to do
is when you come up for questions,
and first of all, I would like
to prioritize student questions
So students, everybody, you guys first.
And there are two microphones here,
so you can line up.
As you ask questions, I would like you to reflect something
that you heard in this lecture.
So you could say, I heard this,
how did that resonate with you?
Something that, you know, struck your heart,
something that you thought about,
something that touched you.
So share one thing, not long.
I'm not talking a speech here.
So, something that you can reflect
from what you heard from Dr. Harden's lecture.
And then ask a question.
So, the microphone's open,
so please, if you want to ask questions,
please come to the microphone.
- Thank you so much for coming.
I really appreciate it, and I've learned a lot.
I'm in my third year, year coming.
My thesis was on the sort of practices
with, mostly people who were incarcerated,
so I really appreciate hearing that and
a lot of what I learned was that very little research
is done in the social work field.
And so my question is kind of two parts.
First off, how did you, how was it
working with the communities?
And getting people to buy in.
And secondly, what do you recommend
to bring that more to the social work field,
especially in master's programs?
So, I'll take it, and elsewhere, to keep this conversation
going, because there's such little research published
in the social work field on the subject.
- Right, thank you.
Much of the literature is dominated
in the criminal justice world, right?
There're a lot of people talking about it,
thinking about it.
I would argue, and I haven't heard this much,
but here's what my guess is, is that a lot of social workers
say, duh, we've been doing this for a long time, right?
And so now, we've been doing group work
and peace circles, you know, and isn't this just
an encounter group in the 70s, right?
You know, so a lot of folks have been saying,
I think critiquing, or at least not understanding
in that way.
But what's happening is that there is, at least in Chicago,
it's really become a very powerful movement,
because again, this idea of community voice,
where it's that, and one of the ways it's really grounded,
for a lot of people, is inside of peace circles.
Peacekeeping circles.
And one of the things that happens with that, again,
it's kind of a therapy style, if you will,
but people really get a chance to speak and it's more,
it's more lay practitioners, if you will,
it's not necessarily people who are highly trained
in social work or psychology, and it's not therapy.
But it is an opportunity for people to exercise some agency,
so it's become, in a lot of ways, a very common movement
around the work that we do.
And so, there are some of us talking and looking,
and actually some of the things we wanted to do
was really begin that process.
We're actually having a conference next week in Chicago
with a lot of people who are doing
this work or coming together.
And actually, we're gonna talk about some of the evaluation
and research stuff to kind of push the envelope around that.
But what we see, and this is the problem and the challenge,
why it's a joint advocacy piece around the school system,
is that that's the place where it's taking place a lot,
is in our, a lot of people are doing, really creating.
I would argue, I don't know, a few months ago,
the Department of Education and the Department of Justice
both Arnie Duncan and Holder came out
and talked about this idea of discipline practices
and that we need to do and we need guidelines
that don't have any money or force behind them, right.
But ultimately these guidelines about looking at issues
of race in schools and understanding,
and looking at disciplines in practice.
And we argue that some of that came out of the conversation
in Chicago that's been happening.
But the problem is, that if the principals haven't bought
into it, there's a problem.
I don't know if people have seen this show on CNN
that's been coming on, in the spring it came on,
about Chicago, called Chicago.
But we really don't like that show,
just to let you know.
But, it did feature Elizabeth Dozier, who's a principal
at Fenger High School.
And Fenger instituted
a lot of restorative justice practices.
Robert Spicer's featured in that, he's a friend of mine.
And so they do some incredible work
around really trying to institute it as a school,
and there's different schools that have popped up
and also within some of the juvenile reform piece.
So I think we're pushing the envelope.
I think work like this helps push that envelope.
But I think it's, first understand that it can be evaluated.
You know, national recidivism rates were the first place
to look at that, but it also is associated with other things
that we can begin to process and look at, so.
All right.
- [Voiceover] Can students please come to the microphone?
- Good evening.
- As far as one-zero, U of I Institute.
The game is over.
- [Voiceover] Two-one.
- All right.
How'd y'all know that?
Right.
(laughter)
It's all right.
It's okay.
We had a thing running here where he's supposed to tell me
the score, you know, actually, when we.
No, I'm just kidding.
That's fine.
- So I wanna say two things.
I appreciate your conversation about your opening point
about your daughter at home.
Mine is with me because she herself protested
at my leaving.
(laughter)
Dennis, the young man that you worked with,
I think that he was on to something.
He said that until peace is profitable,
we won't see peace in our communities.
And I think he was speaking to something really important
that I find is often left out of conversations,
when, even when the focus is anti-racism, right?
And that is, the conversation about economic inequality.
And so, you're telling us about Chicago schools being closed
and violence in communities,
and I wonder how, as social workers, we begin to tackle
a particular agenda around economic inequality,
and if the focus on anti-racism turns us away from that.
Right?
Let me just clarify what I'm saying.
So.
- I think I got you.
- Yeah, I wanna make sure everybody gets me.
- That's fine, that's fine.
- So.
This work is restorative, right?
There's something about that word
that for me means that we are restoring or fixing something
inside something that's broken.
Inside something larger, right?
And we are social workers and we're it.
The buck kind of stops with us.
I feel like we are the ones that have to come in
and tackle that something larger.
And what's the mission and who becomes the target
of that work?
Is it those inside the larger structure?
Or is it those outside?
And what is the mission, what's the agenda?
Is it anti-racist, or is it anti-poverty?
Anti-capitalism.
Anti-inequality.
And is that, and how's the conversation
get pulled away from that when we start talking
about healing inside communities
and racism and how people of color are impacted?
- Right thank you.
Beautiful question.
So.
First, I think the question of economic justice
and inequality, right?
That's supposed to be part of our mission too, right?
As social workers, so.
But we also know from texts like Fallen Angels
and things like that that we've gotten away from that.
In Nicaragua, right, when the Sandinistas overthrew
the government, one of the first things they did,
they shut down the social work program, right?
Because they basically said that we were agents of the state
and ultimately we're not in the game
of changing society, but in really keeping the status quo.
And I'm reminded of a Tupac quote, right?
And Tupac said, you know, The first time somebody
knocks on the door and says they're hungry,
the people in the room, they eatin' good,
they say, aw, you know, come back in a second, you know.
And the person comes back and he goes away,
and they knock on the door again and they come back again,
and they're, you know, a little bit more upset
and agitated, you know, and they still hungry.
And they say go away again and come back later.
And then next time, they kickin' in the door, right?
I believe that's the state we're closing in on, right?
And I think the conversation is both/and.
It's not either/or.
And I think that's the challenge
is that we have to deal with both the race
and the economic issue.
We aren't in a post-racial world, right?
And that's part of the myth, the fallacy of Obama
and all that is that, somehow or other
we've arrived, you know?
And that, if we have to, and we can't ignore the inequities
associated with the criminal justice system,
the education system, all these different systems,
and what's happening.
An we also can't ignore the poverty issue
and the economic issue.
I think that's part of the problem
is that we try to separate them, you know,
and look at 'em one or the other
and I think that's false.
I think it's a both/and.
And I think part of the work that we do
is inherently saying, claim all of who you are
to begin the process with speaking about all of what you are
experiencing and all of where we need to go.
And so, whether it's our young people
or whether it's my students, or whether it's the other work,
larger work in our city, I think the challenge is,
for social workers, is that so many people
have been silenced, right, from claiming all of who they are
and all of where they need to go or where they should go.
And so that's why some of our work as organizers,
is sometimes just about voice, right,
and really bringing the people together around exercising
in order to work on a common cause.
I heard somewhere, somebody says that hope
is not an individual thing, it's a community piece.
It's a collective.
And within that, you know, we really need to ask
the question of what is our collective voice around that,
whether it's our 99% voice or whatever, you know.
But it's time.
You know, we had a conversation coming here
about industry.
And, you know, I'm in a city that, you know,
there are no jobs.
You know, and the jobs aren't coming back.
And so what's gonna happen.
And we having this false promise about work
and what that means,
and so how are we gonna recreate something.
And some of that has to come
with knocking the whole system down.
And so there's a lot of talk about, for example,
Angela Davis' work, of course, in critical resistance
and what it means to completely dismantle the system.
I don't like, I'm not, I'm not,
honestly, I like transformative justice a little better
than I do restorative justice, right,
because the question is, are we trying to return
to something in the '60s or '70s or something, right?
That was already broke?
Or are we trying to make something new?
But the reality is that, you know, we are beginning
a process of really identifying the language
associated with healing, community healing,
that actually looks at transformative speech.
I said a lot, I don't know if I answered
some of your question, but I think, you know,
I think it's a both/and.
I think we can't, we can no longer do the either/or.
And part of it is because my Marxist friends,
I always critique them about culture, right?
We cannot ignore culture.
We cannot ignore the affirmation of that, you know.
And so often that gets left out of the conversation
when we begin the process.
That is critically important to the black community.
At least to the community I come from,
is to affirm that and to affirm the identity
after the onslaught, partly with capitalism,
but ultimately also too with white supremacy.
There has to be a healing that takes place,
you know, associated with that.
There's a saying we say that there is no mental escape,
there's no physical escape from a mental plantation, right?
That plantation is both white and black, you know,
with Twelve Years a Slave.
Whatever critique we wanna have about that movie,
it shows we're all impacted by that illness,
that disease, you know, so.
- I think that's a really big, important question,
and I wanted to ask you sort of a more of a
micro-level question.
I really appreciated what you had to say about
non-traditional leadership, and I really appreciated
that concept of bringing that in as a strength
of the youth that participated,
and I wondered about what the sort of time commitment
of this program was for the youth.
And I wondered about, given how stressful
some of their lives were and some of the communities
and environments they were living in,
if that impacted their participation at all,
or how that affected the program.
- Right.
So, just answering in reverse.
They saw our space as a safe space.
And so often, whether it was because they had brothers
and sisters at home, or it was an unsafe environment,
or whatever was going on,
they didn't have a lot of spaces
where they could just do themselves, right?
So even in understanding in developing a youth space, right,
there's something to be said about really stepping back
and claiming what that is in partnership with them,
and you know, what that means, and so we really worked hard
to create a youth space, a black space, you know,
and also a do you space, you know,
so whatever that meant.
We met two days a week after school, two and a half hours,
and then on weekends for about three or four hours, right?
And so it's taken on different variations of that
over the course of the last year and a half.
And so sometimes we still do some of that
and then we'll break off and just concentrate
on a Saturday or depending on what's going on, yeah.
So maybe about six or seven hours a week.
- [Voiceover] Was a Tupac resurrection?
- Uh, yes.
- [Voiceover] My main question is coming.
You seemed to talk a lot about impact your program has had
on young men.
I was just curious if you could talk about the impact
on young women.
- Both/and.
That's unfortunate you couldn't see the video,
because it is, it's so rich around the both/and of that.
Right, that, that space, Truth 'n Trauma was young men
and young women.
And so, I mean it just so happened
that it was mostly the young women,
some of the young men, but mostly the young women
who create the theater piece, right, so it really,
you should see that.
But it was both/and.
So, I do work with young men,
I do a lot of work, but we also do both.
A lot of Project Mentor was both young men and young women.
And so, you know, we see positive results.
Different, unique pieces, unique stories within that.
But then, some similar issues, right.
So, so the work becomes, how do you do
the gender affirmation, right, needed within that work,
and what that meant, and sort of sharing the space,
being in solidarity, you know, even with other women,
you know, who are working in the cohort with us, right?
I think it had a powerful impact on them as well, yeah.
- [Voiceover] I appreciate you talking about how
your intention was not to do a lot of,
to focus on anti-violence work, but the youth
that you worked with really kept coming back to that
as an issue in their community and in their lives.
I thought that was a really great piece, especially for us
as social workers, thinking about the client
as kind of our leader and where we go with them.
My question, you know, relates around the anti-violence
work that you're doing.
I don't know if that's what you call it, but.
Really, how do you partner with other organizations
in Chicago like Ceasefire, who's doing similar work?
Or maybe not similar work, I don't know.
- So there are, part of the beauty
of being in the academy
is that I get to see very powerful work taking place.
And so, you know,
a lot of people talk about The Interrupters,
so Ameena, for example, the young lady who was featured
in Interrupters, is one of our partners
and connected and other folks who were doing work
with Cure Violence is what they're called now.
So we work with all different types
of organizations,
whether those are youth groups, adult groups.
I personally work with a lot of different groups
in consulting and training folks
in different methods as well, right?
Because I think, again, particularly when we talk about
this idea of healing, right, and even moving
out the clinical space, there's still not a lot of work
and understanding what that looks like
and what that means, and dealing with even some of
the economic issues, you know,
and the economic injustice issues.
So, we're talking a lot about this issue of school closing
is really looking at the privatization associated
with so many different institutions,
including the criminal justice system
as well as our schools, the running away
with charter schools, you know, this whole
charter school is the answer to everything is a huge problem
in our work, and a lot of it is economic driven.
So we have to deal with some of those issues.
We can no longer ignore it, and so our work
is again the both/and in that space,
and so we work with a lot of organizations
that are doing that work.
And they do good work, and again, it's not without critique.
You know, you talking about Cease Fire,
and I could talk more about that if you'd like me to.
- [Voiceover] Hello.
I appreciate how you started out by saying
nobody has a past, including you,
so I thought that was a great way to start the conversations
we are discussing here.
I have two questions.
The first is a quickie.
We didn't get to see the videos, obviously,
we're all upset about that, and you also had
a lot of good stuff that we zipped past.
I'm not sure if you're willing to pass that on to us
as Smith students?
- Absolutely.
(laughter)
- [Voiceover] Question number two.
What is the plan to move this program
that's been so successful in your area to other areas,
to other states, to making it bigger in other locations?
- Well.
Right now we're manualizing everything, so all the stuff
that we're doing, we created a manual,
training stuff around that.
And so that should be available probably end of summer.
And, so we're working with other groups in Chicago right now
around some of this work.
I think part of the issue too, is that we didn't,
you know, this, yes, we created a black space and all this,
but you can create a Puerto Rican space, right?
Or maybe it's a multi-racial, and has a different theme.
Or maybe it takes a stance on economic injustice
a little bit more.
The point is, is to do, is again, to look at both
the macro- and micro- issues within the context
of trauma and also healing and community transformation
and the work that they do.
And like I said, the work, our work around the CPS Bullies
is grounded in the CRC, the Convention for the Rights
of the Child, you know, through the United Nations.
One of the things, and those who may not know
a little bit about that, there's only two countries
that haven't signed on and ratified that treaty,
that's the U.S. and Somalia, right?
You know, so we're in pretty good company, you know.
But we're asking the question around
you know, are our schools living up to basic human rights,
you know, associated with our young people
and our children.
Is the juvenile justice system doing those things?
And so our work, you know, is both around this kind of
healing pieces, but then also really asking how do we create
the environments, you know, and challenge these systems
that are creating these inequities, and so.
So that's a long answer to a short question.
Thank you.
- I believe this question was somehow addressed,
but I'd like you to elaborate a little more.
It's about what you noticed in the schools
and the closing of the schools,
and I guess I wanna know what happened
to all those students who were in those schools
and if any of this model
has been brought to any of the schools
that are remaining or have emerged,
such as the charter schools.
I don't think that they are exempt from issues
like this.
Because it's a terrific.
Oh, I didn't use that in my question, sorry.
But the program that you have described tonight
is exemplary and it needs to spread
as everybody said.
And the schools are such a, you know, are waiting for this.
- Thank you.
Well.
So, I'm gonna speak first to charter schools in Chicago
and, let me say this about charter schools.
Charter schools emerge from a lot of people
really doing creative things with schools
in a lot of communities around the world, you know,
particularly around the U.S.
And so they were looked at as being very progressive
in a lot of ways.
And we saw a really cooptation of that process
in Chicago was around this Renaissance 2010 Program,
you know, that really looked at, really closing
a lot of schools, coincided with some of the
No Child Left Behind work around school accountability
and testing and all that kind of stuff.
So long story short.
Because of this pressure that many charter schools
now feel to really kowtow to a larger system, right?
A much more conservative system.
They aren't always seen as very progressive spaces.
And so, that work that really challenges systems,
you know, they're terrified to do.
Right, and they're under a lot of pressure
to adhere to some other things from the city of Chicago
in particular, and even nationally,
you know, as a conversation.
So having said that we have worked in other schools.
We are working in a community called Eaglewood right now.
And so, yes, the work is spreading, you know,
slowly but surely, you know, we're doing that.
But again, you know this idea of really having
a strong committed student voice
that's asking critical questions about
what's happening with their schools?
You know, people don't always wanna hear that.
And they're afraid of that, you know.
So they want people to have a conversation
more so around how you're shootin' each other
and it impacts you, not how the school,
when I walk down the halls I got principals yelling at me.
You know, I got security guards accosting me.
You know, we don't want that, or we creating
a hostile environment where people are doing their
emotional work in the hallways because they have
no other place to go.
So, you know.
All right.
Hopefully I answered your question.
All right.
- Obviously, your talk has brought a lot of thoughts
and questions.
It's about nine o'clock, so we'll have to end soon.
But do you have any final comments
you'd like to make.
- Well, I just appreciate again the opportunity
to be able to be out.
I think the work, again, is about being inherently
within struggle with each other.
There is a line that I actually really wanted
you all to hear in the students' play, right.
And you would see them talking about
some of the issues that they deal with,
some of the issues with schools and things like that,
and also with the violence, you know.
But ultimately, what needs to happen
in order to transform it, and at the end of the play,
the other line which they say is
the only way out is through, right?
The only way out is through.
So there's no way around it, there's no way underneath it,
no way, you know, to escape it.
We've gotta go through it.
All right, we gotta be willing to struggle together.
You know, so ultimately that's the work, you know.
We gotta, the only way out is through.
So.
- Thank you.
(applause)
Before we go, I know there's several student groups
who I think wanted to meet afterwards to talk.
If you're a leader of those groups who are meeting,
please raise your hand.
Okay.
And please see the leaders as you walk out
if you want to.
Thank you, and have a good night.