When Jarem Sawatsky wanted to bring trauma coursework to the Canadian School of Peacebuilding (CSOP), he turned to two experts he knew well: Vernon Jantzi, who had taught Sawatsky when he was a CJP student a dozen years earlier, and fellow CJP alumnus Elaine Zook Barge.

As CJP’s lead instructors for Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR), Zook Barge and Jantzi are in high demand around the world, but they said they couldn’t refuse a request from Sawatsky, who co-founded CSOP in 2009. They accepted it even before they learned that the 2014 session of the school would be Sawatsky’s last as co-director, due to his declining health. (CJP restorative justice expert Howard Zehr also agreed to teach at CSOP 2014).

From the first minutes of the opening ceremony of CSOP, Zook Barge and Jantzi felt on familiar ground. Similar to SPI, CSOP began with a group ritual and introductions. But the ritual was one they hadn’t seen at SPI, and they loved it.
“We all put some grass seeds into soil within a former oil barrel,” said Jantzi. “We were told that we were helping to transform this soil into something productive and nurturing.”

At the closing ceremony that wrapped up the week, everyone could see shoots of grass poking through the soil. “It felt like the opening and closing rituals were bookends,” Jantzi said. “It was a moving experience.”

STAR was popular at CSOP, capped at 24 participants in the class. The two dozen enrollees were predominately female, and their age range was wide, 19 to 85 years. Undergraduates comprised more than half of those enrolled, which is unusual compared to other STAR trainings.

The undergrads were taking the course for college credit, requiring them to produce two papers. “We spent a whole lot of time grading papers,” Zook Barge said with a shake of her head, as if “never again.” She quickly added, though: “A lot of really good personal stuff came out of the papers that wasn’t shared in class.”

The young adults didn’t have the life experiences that STAR participants usually bring to the trainings, making it difficult for them to connect what they were learning with happenings in broader society, said Jantzi. “But it was good to see the way they became reflective about their life experiences to date.”

Jantzi, whose memories of SPI date to its founding years, said the lean staffing at CSOP reminded him of SPI two decades ago, when a tiny group of dedicated people were stretched to their maximum. “As far as I could see, [co-director] Valerie Smith and two student interns handled almost everything themselves – registration, food, snacks, taking photographs.”

����Vlog 200 people attended CSOP at some point during its two five-day sessions. The structure of the day was similar to SPI, with coffee breaks that gathered people from all the classes, except that CSOP didn’t restrict these to morning breaks. They had a group break in the afternoon too.

One other difference: CSOP holds classes for five straight days; almost all of SPI’s classes last for seven days, broken by a weekend.

“We copied the opening ceremonies, coffee breaks and group photographs from ����Vlog,” Sawatsky told his ����Vlog friends with a smile. His friends smiled back: that meant SPI was doing its job well, if its tried-and-true model fit other places and peoples too.

Instead of returning for ����Vlog’s “homecoming” celebration – always held over one weekend each October – degree-holding alumni of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) often show up for its annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

And those SPI alumni who aren’t aiming to earn a degree? Some of them just keep coming back year after year – almost as an educational vacation – or they send their colleagues and friends to SPI.

Of the 2,800 SPI participants over the last 19 years, more than one in five have been repeat participants, taking courses during a second year or even multiple years of SPI. In that number must be counted almost all of CJP’s 398 master’s degree alumni, plus 91 graduate certificate holders. Some of their MA classmates are now SPI instructors, plus many of their professors have taught at SPI year after year.

Detouring six hours to reconnect

Among the first drop-bys to SPI 2014 were Florina Benoit and Ashok Gladston of India, both 2004 MA grads from CJP and now PhD-holders. They made a six-hour round-trip detour from a family-related stop in Baltimore, Maryland, to say “hello” to folks at SPI.

Gladston was last at ����Vlog in June 2011 when he gave a heart-wrenching talk at ����Vlog centering on women from a minority group in southern India who were being violently victimized by mobs from the surrounding majority group.

The two, both former Fulbright Scholars married to each other, happened to arrive on May 7 when Doreen Ruto of Kenya, a 2006 MA graduate, was the featured SPI “Frontier Luncheon” speaker, along with her colleague (and son) Richy Bikko, a 2011 BA graduate who majored in justice, peace and conflict studies.

Over that day, Gladston and Benoit interacted with a dozen professors, staffers and alumni whom they recalled from their studies at CJP 10 years ago.

When the day turned to evening and their borrowed car was found to have a non-working headlight, they lingered for activities very familiar to them – a community “potluck” meal, followed by a cultural program led by SPI participants, and informal dancing. (They huddled with this writer for much of that time answering questions about their work in India – but more on that later.)

They then accepted the impromptu invitation of Margaret Foth, a retiree who has been a long-time liaison with CJP alumni, and slept in a guest room at the Foths’ home, adjacent to ����Vlog.

 “It was like we recalled from our time as graduate students,” says Benoit. “We felt like we were visiting our second home.”

In 2013, Gladstone and Benoit had been scheduled to teach an SPI course on the logistics of humanitarian aid – more specifically, on how such aid intersects with peacebuilding practices, including the “do no harm” principle – but, unfortunately, that year the number of people seeking such training was insufficient to hold the course.

Always more to learn

A third former Fulbright Scholar, Shoqi Abas Al-Maktary, MA ’07, took a break from his job as country director in Yemen for Search for Common Ground and spent May 15-23 taking the SPI course “Designing Peacebuilding Programs – From Conflict Assessment to Planning. ”

“I don’t think anyone in this field can afford to stop being a student,” says Al-Maktary, who holds a second master’s degree in security management from Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. “There is always more to know, more to explore with others in the field. And SPI – with its intensive courses – is a great place to do this.”

Thomas DeWolf of the United States just finished attending his fourth SPI in six years, with the course “Media for Societal Transformation.” He first came in 2008 where he explored Coming to the Table (explained in next paragraph). He returned for a restorative justice course in 2009, and then in 2012, received a scholarship to take “Healing the Wounds of History: Peacebuilding through Transformative Theater.”

DeWolf’s connection to SPI began with CJP’s sponsorship of Coming to the Table, an organization focused on addressing the enduring impact of the slavery era in the United States. DeWolf has played a leading role in this organization, which held its annual conference at ����Vlog this year, over a weekend between two sessions of SPI.

Seven times at SPI

A 76-year-old clinical psychologist from Argentina, Lilian Burlando, has an astonishing record of attendance at SPI, having attended about a third of all the years SPI has been held. From her home at the southern-most tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, Burlando has attended SPI seven times: in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. Often with her, also taking classes, have been members of her family of five children and 19 grandchildren. One of her daughters, Maria Karina Echazu, for instance, is a prosecuting attorney in Argentina who took a restorative justice course in 2007 and a practice course in 2011.

Burlando calls SPI “a refreshing experience,” citing interesting course topics, excellent professors and the sense of community. “To me,” she says, “SPI has been a fountain of intellectual and spiritual enrichment.”

Almost all the teachers at SPI – even those like Johonna McCants, who holds a PhD from the University of Maryland – have also been students at SPI at some point. McCants explains how she found her way to SPI:

In 2009, while finishing my doctoral dissertation, I began searching online for practical training in the issues I was writing about. I discovered CJP and SPI and quickly fell in love. I was attracted by the integration of theory and practice, the variety of courses, the diversity of participants, backgrounds of the instructors, and that the program was housed at a Christian university. I participated in Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) at SPI just a few weeks after receiving my PhD. The STAR experience, which was phenomenal, kept me coming back for more.

McCants brought along a first-timer to SPI 2014, Julian Turner. These two, who first met as teenagers, would be married in a month. But first Turner, who works at an infectious disease clinic in Washington D.C., soaked up the wisdom of Hizkias Assefa in “Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” while McCants co-taught with Carl Stauffer “Restorative Justice: The Promise, the Challenge.”

Loves the diverse people

From her base as a high school teacher in a public school in Washington D.C. – and with experience as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland – McCants says she is struck by the egalitarian learning community formed by SPI, where the instructors and participants respect and learn from each other.

Her favorite part about SPI?

Definitely, the people! I enjoy learning from people from different parts of the United States and countries all over the world, hearing their stories and developing new relationships. I also like reuniting and reconnecting with people I’ve met during previous times at SPI.

Discovering SPI on the internet, as McCants did, is not typical. More often, SPI participants are encouraged to attend by previous participants.

Libby Hoffman, president and founder of the Catalyst for Peace foundation, for example, attended SPI in 1996 and took another CJP course in 2000. This year she dispatched two rising leaders of Fambul Tok – an organization doing amazing work of promoting post-war reconciliation throughout Sierra Leone – to take two successive courses at SPI. Micheala Ashwood and Emmanuel Mansaray both took “Leading Healthy Organizations,” in addition to “Analysis – Understanding Conflict” and “Psychosocial Trauma,”
respectively.

Ten CJP master’s degree alumni had teaching roles at SPI 2014: Dr. Sam Gbaydee Doe, MA ’98; Dr. Barb Toews,   MA ’00; Dr. Carl Stauffer, MA ’02; Elaine Zook Barge, MA ’03; Roxy Allen Kioko, MA ’07 (PhD candidate); Paulette Moore, MA ’09 (PhD candidate); Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho, MA ’09 (PhD candidate); Caroline Borden, MA ’12; Soula Pefkaros, MA ’10 (PhD candidate); and Danielle Taylor, MA ’13. < — Bonnie Price Lofton

As with so many aspects of U.S. society and culture, the disaster relief community has its clear “pre-” and “post-9/11” periods. Back in the pre-days, the mentality and capabilities of organizations like FEMA and the Red Cross revolved around the physical needs of disaster victims: food, shelter and clothing. Within days of entering post-era, it became clear that the September 11 attacks pointed to the need for psychological support, not just physical assistance.

Within a week of September 11, 2001, Rick Augsburger contacted ����Vlog’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). Then working in Manhattan as the director of emergency programs for Church World Service – one of the relief organizations facing a challenge it wasn’t well equipped to handle – Augsburger knew about the pioneering work that had been done at CJP of connecting trauma healing to the theory and practice of peacebuilding. Three days after the attacks, he placed a call to CJP to ask for help.

“We were the only conflict transformation program that had any trauma studies in the curriculum,” remembers Jan Jenner, who was director of the Practice Institute at CJP. Through Jenner, Augsburger invited CJP to develop a trauma-healing program in response to the terrorist attacks and pledged full funding for the initiative.

Two weeks after 9/11, CJP professor Barry Hart was in New York City meeting with Augsburger and his staff about a programmatic response to the tragedy. When Jenner and Hart shared the concept with other faculty members and staff at CJP, the group collectively developed an outline of what was to become Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience, or STAR.

“I knew we would get strong commitment, high quality work and an ability to think outside of the box,” says Augsburger, a ’91 graduate of ����Vlog who had previously worked with CJP on several trauma-related projects. “9/11 was something that none of us had experienced before, and we needed something different.”

In Augsburger’s eyes, CJP’s close institutional ties to the Mennonite church strengthened its ability to provide leadership in meeting the needs of traumatized groups. Religion, after all, was perceived as a major player in the events of 9/11, and leaders from a wide variety of religious traditions found themselves on the front lines of response within their own communities.

Putting together the pieces

“We had the pieces – trauma healing, restorative justice, a spiritual center – that we could put in place for the program that is now known as STAR,” says Jayne Docherty, a CJP professor of leadership and public policy who was involved in the program from its earliest planning stages. “Tapping the expertise of all the faculty members here, we were able to develop a holistic, integrative approach to the 9/11 crisis and its aftermath.”

The first STAR workshop was held in February of 2002. As STAR’s founding director, Carolyn Yoder had woven the strands of CJP’s work and her own trauma-counseling expertise into a viable short-term program. While the format and materials have constantly been tweaked and revised, the major elements of that initial workshop have remained largely the same. Later that spring, Yoder adapted and expanded the diagrams used by Barry Hart and psychologist Olga Botcharova – who had worked together in the war-torn Balkans – into a three-part model of trauma healing. This model, including an easy-to-remember snail diagram (see below), remains central to the STAR curriculum.

From the beginning, the intensive, one-week STAR courses have included an exploration of the nature and effects of trauma on individuals and communities as well as study and discussion on the relationship of trauma-healing to the other key pieces of CJP’s peacebuilding framework, including restorative justice, security, mediation and conflict transformation.

A decade prior to all this, Hart was in Liberia helping lead trauma healing and reconciliation workshops for people affected by that country’s civil war. Hart, then pursuing a doctorate in conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University, was working with the Christian Health Association of Liberia, which was very interested in addressing the psychological wounds suffered by so many people in the country.

“I was coming in not as a psychologist but as a conflict transformation person,” says Hart. “It became very clear to me that these so-called ‘ethnic wars’ not only had an identity aspect, but a significant psychological one.”

Pioneer in linking trauma to conflict

Hart ended up spending two years in Liberia. He used the dozens of trauma-healing workshops he conducted there as field research for a dissertation that was one of the first academic works to draw clear links between the fields of conflict transformation and trauma healing.

In the summer of 1994, Hart gave a presentation on his work at a peacebuilding conference at ����Vlog (the forerunner of today’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute). It struck a nerve, leading to a class on trauma healing and ultimately to the subject becoming integral to the MA curriculum.

Over the next five years, Hart continued to integrate trauma healing and conflict resolution while working in war-ravaged areas of the Balkans. He returned to ����Vlog’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute each year to teach on the subject. Hart usually co-taught the course with Nancy Good, a clinical social worker and trauma expert who was a member of the CJP faculty from its early years and who also played a key role in pioneering a connection between trauma healing on the individual level with peacebuilding on a larger scale.

“CJP takes a very interdisciplinary approach to peacebuilding,” says Lisa Schirch, a research professor at ����Vlog and the director of 3P Human Security. “We recognize that people’s personal and emotional wounds need to be addressed in addition to the structural, economic and political changes that are required for peacebuilding.”

“Psychosocial trauma and peacebuilding” is now one of the five academic concentrations offered to graduate students at CJP, overseen by Hart, who joined the faculty full time after leaving the Balkans in 1999. Even today, CJP remains one of a very few graduate-level peace programs in the United States that places such an emphasis on trauma healing.

Pushing edges of field

“In the 1990s, it was pushing the edges of the field to say ‘trauma matters,’ and it still is, as a matter of fact,” says Docherty. An important aspect of CJP’s trauma work is the recognition that “many of our students arrive traumatized, sometimes directly from ‘killing fields,’” adds Docherty, CJP’s new program director. “We have asked ourselves, ‘How can we support them?’ Giving them an education in trauma awareness and resilience is one way.”

Shortly after the inaugural STAR training, the program began to adapt its curriculum for different audiences. In 2002, Elaine Zook Barge interned with STAR as a graduate student to develop a Spanish-language version of the training. She helped lead the first Spanish STAR in November 2002 in Colombia; the first Spanish STAR at ����Vlog was held the next month.

Another early adaptation was Youth STAR, designed by an international team of youth workers and intended to teach trauma skills to young people. (This effort was led by Vesna Hart, a native of Croatia who holds an MA in education from ����Vlog.)

Grant funding from Church World Service supported the STAR program through 2005, by which time nearly 800 people from 38 states and 63 countries had participated in seminars on ����Vlog’s campus, including the first sessions of Level II STAR. This advanced training prepares Level I graduates to themselves become practitioners, leading their own trauma-resilience workshops based on the STAR curriculum.

Given that the program had run longer and grown larger than many had expected at the beginning, CJP decided to continue STAR using a fee-for-service model. In 2006, as STAR grappled with the challenges of sustaining itself financially, Barge became the second director of the STAR program.

Adaptation, new directions and new partnerships have characterized STAR in the years since. Barge helped develop a Village STAR curriculum for use in settings where pictures tend to work better than lots of written words. Coming to the Table – now an associate organization of CJP that uses the STAR trauma-healing framework to address the legacy of slavery in the United States – also grew directly out STAR’s work at ����Vlog.

Coming to the Table’s history-rooted twist on STAR led to Transforming Historical Harms, which looks at “historic traumas” that continue to inflict pain decades or centuries after a traumatic event or circumstance has ended (see article).

Global attention to trauma

From 2002 to 2007, STAR workshops were held in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Uganda, Burundi and South Sudan. In 2008, CJP graduates working in Myanmar requested STAR assistance following a devastating cyclone. Also upon request, STAR went to Mexico in 2009, and Northern Ireland, Bolivia and Haiti in 2010 (for more on the work in Haiti, see this article).

The geographic spread of STAR has also occurred domestically. In Massachusetts, Beverly Prestwood-Taylor, a United Church of Christ minister and trauma-specialist who has taken courses at CJP, adapted STAR for veterans and their supporters into a two-day program called the Journey Home from War (see article). Donna Minter, a STAR alumna from Minnesota, returned home to found the Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Academy, which has hosted six STAR trainings since 2010 (see article).

Since she took over as director, Barge estimates that one-third of STAR trainings have taken place at ����Vlog, one-third have been held elsewhere in the United States, and one-third have happened overseas. The total number people who’ve taken STAR trainings over the past 11 years is difficult to determine, given the proliferation of off-site trainings. What is certain is this: hundreds of individual STAR trainings have taken place on five continents, reaching thousands of people directly and rippling out far more broadly yet, as participants use the trauma-awareness and resilience principles in their personal and professional lives.

Rick Augsburger, whose phone call to CJP days after 9/11 led to the creation of STAR, says the disaster-relief community today is far better prepared to recognize and address the psychological impacts of disasters. While STAR can’t take full credit for that, it played an early and important role in introducing trauma awareness to these groups, says Augsburger, now the managing director of the KonTerra group, a consulting firm based in Washington D.C. that focuses on improving clarity, resilience and learning in domestic and international organizations. Growing awareness of and interest in trauma-related issues extends beyond disaster-relief agencies (see article).

“Because of the work we’ve done over the last 18 years here, people have started to pay attention to trauma,” says Barry Hart. “The major funders out there are becoming more and more aware of the need to incorporate trauma elements into the larger peacebuilding framework.”

Looking ahead, this new, wider interest in trauma awareness represents an opportunity for STAR to provide consultation, trainings and workshops to equip organizations with staff who are able to do trauma-sensitive programming (. “As more individuals want to share STAR with others, the program is facing the challenge of making sure that what others call STAR includes the complex mix of psychosocial trauma healing, restorative justice and conflict transformation components that make STAR unique,” says Jayne Docherty, incoming program director for CJP. “We’re working on a process for certifying STAR trainers and practitioners that will be available to students in the MA program as well as to other individuals.”

After he got back from the war, Mark Lauro couldn’t pick up his young son without thinking about that night in Iraq. He was an Army National Guard sergeant with a company deployed in 2007 to provide security for military supply convoys. Lauro was in an armored vehicle running reconnaissance a few kilometers ahead of the others, keeping an eye out for trouble and choosing the best route to follow. As he often did, Lauro led the group against traffic on a divided highway to lessen the chance of an IED attack, clearing oncoming civilian vehicles off the road until the convoy had passed.

Among the vehicles he encountered that night was an ambulance, which continued to advance slowly despite Lauro’s commands to stop. Intelligence reports had been warning against possible attacks from emergency vehicles filled with explosives, and Lauro began to run down the rules of engagement checklist: verbal commands, flashing lights, warning shots. The ambulance finally stopped, but a man climbed out and continued to approach on foot, carrying something in his arms. Lauro was preparing to exercise his final, lethal option when he saw that the man was weeping, carrying his badly wounded son, in a desperate search for help. Lauro waved the ambulance on its way and radioed back to the convoy for medical help. The boy died, Lauro later learned.

Months later Lauro returned home to his family in Virginia, but he continued to be troubled by the incident, especially by the way he’d nearly shot another man who was simply trying to save his son.

The STAR program and the war that Mark Lauro helped fight in Iraq can both trace their origins to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. They were very different responses by very different institutions to unprecedented traumas in modern American history. More than a decade after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, public concern is growing about the psychological cost of those conflicts on American soldiers. In early 2013, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reported that 22 veterans commit suicide every day. As a result, the STAR program has increasingly looked for ways to work with veterans still struggling on the home front.

One of those closely involved with the issue is Beverly Prestwood-Taylor, executive director of the Brookfield Institute, a Massachusetts-based organization that promotes trauma-healing and peacebuilding. She was familiar with ����Vlog’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding by way of graduate classes she’d taken while pursuing a doctorate at Hartford Seminary. Seeking ways to prepare church congregations and veterans’ families to support soldiers after their return home, Prestwood-Taylor took the week-long STAR training at ����Vlog and began to incorporate its methodology into her work.

The result: a program called the Journey Home From War, a specialized STAR workshop designed for veterans and people in their families, communities or congregations looking for ways to support them. Prestwood-Taylor led the first Journey Home from War workshop in 2009, and has since spun off a variety of similarly designed programs aimed at specific audiences like the clergy and women veterans.

More recently, the Brookfield Institute has also provided trauma-healing and resilience training to a group of United Church of Christ congregations in Massachusetts that were looking for ways to support returning veterans. The participating churches have since launched their own programs, including several support groups and a yoga class for veterans.

Not long after his return to Virginia, Lauro enrolled in the Adult Degree Completion Program at ����Vlog to earn a degree in management and organizational development. Among his final assignments was a paper about his difficulty readjusting to life back home. The style of discipline Sergeant Lauro used for 20-year-old Army privates in Iraq didn’t translate well to a household with two young children. One night, driving to Washington D.C. for a getaway with his wife, a pair of approaching headlights on the interstate triggered a flashback to his reconnaissance patrols in Iraq.

The professor who read Lauro’s paper told him about the STAR program and connected him with STAR director Elaine Zook Barge, who was looking for ways to reach out to veterans. Barge invited Lauro to a STAR training, and in 2011, he went, intending to do nothing more than provide her with feedback from a veteran’s perspective. To his surprise, the experience became intensely personal. He talked about the night he met the ambulance, and in doing so, explored the grief and remorse he’d held ever since.

“I felt free of that burden I’d been carrying.” Lauro says STAR has brought considerable healing to his life, though he still deals occasionally with the effects of his experiences in combat.

In November 2012, Lauro returned to STAR as a speaker at a Journey Home From War workshop led by Prestwood-Taylor on ����Vlog’s campus.

“What STAR offered that we didn’t receive from the military was an explanation of the trauma process. It helped me to understand the technical side of trauma, to understand its actual dynamics, and how these can affect the different parts of the brain,” says Lauro, who works in human resources for the Virginia Department of Transportation. “It wasn’t just theory and concepts. It was science.”

Prestwood-Taylor says STAR is unique in integrating a physiological understanding of trauma with a broader view of its impact on one’s spiritual and social health.

“When most programs look at post-traumatic stress disorder, they deal with body-brain dysfunction and try to help the veteran manage that,” says Prestwood-Taylor. “But there are other aspects of healing that are crucial to finding wholeness.”

She also notes that the majority of veterans who commit suicide today have been home for years (69% are over 50 years old, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs), meaning programs like Journey Home from War need to take a long view.

“The need for the community to reach out to veterans and provide support isn’t a short-term need,” Prestwood-Taylor says. “My hope is that there will be something sustainable for 10 years from now, 20 years from now, when it is needed just as much as it is today.”

Traumagenic refers to events or circumstances – like colonization, civil war, slavery, genocide, systemic discrimination – that cause traumatic reactions and impacts, typically embodied in generation after generation. The victims (and their descendants) of such trauma obviously carry wounds, but so do the perpetrators, though these roles may shift over time, with changing circumstances. Think of the Hutus and the Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi – at different times each group has been among the victims and each among the perpetrators of violence.

“Historically traumagenic circumstances that have not been healed, reconciled or made right can have continuing consequences at the individual, family, organizational, communal, regional, national and even international level for generations,” write Hooker and Czajkowski in Transforming Historical Harms, published in 2011 by ����Vlog’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

The authors emphasize that the mere passage of time does not heal trauma. For this reason, ����Vlog’s STAR program offers trainings centered on the teachings in the Transforming Historical Harms (THH) manual.

“The THH framework requires an understanding of trauma, historical trauma and harms, the mechanisms of legacy and aftermath, and finally a holistic healing approach that’s inclusive of these understandings,” explain Hooker and Czajkowski.

The “healing approach” is grounded in these values:

• truth, based on understanding and facing what really happened in the past;
• mercy, based on developing an empathy for the “other” in his or her context;
• justice, based on righting the wrongs of the past by taking corrective steps today;
• peace, based on recognizing each other’s dignity.

Hooker, assisted by STAR director Elaine Zook Barge, led a two-day THH workshop for 11 participants in April 2013 at ����Vlog. In it, Hooker stressed the importance of “narrative,” or listening to each other’s stories, as a key step in the healing process.

As an example, the THH manual cites Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone (), a national movement of reconciliation and healing to address the aftermath of an 11-year civil war in that country. Sparked by John Caulker and Elisabeth Hoffman, Fambul Tok spread through villages and the countryside, with circles of neighbors sitting around bonfires sharing their experiences, including many instances of confessions, apologies, and forgiveness. At the end, cleansing ceremonies were held.

In the United States, Hooker pointed out that racism remains prevalent through various belief systems and social structures that can trace their roots back to slavery and other events and institutions that many people would consider bygones.

One specific example that came up at the April training was how the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC, assessed property values in hundreds of American cities in an attempt to mitigate a foreclosure crisis during the Great Depression. In Richmond, Virginia, the HOLC assigned grades of A, B, C or D to rank neighborhoods from high (A) to low (D) in terms of desirability and property value. Reflecting the prejudices of the time, race figured into the HOLC assessors’ work in a way shocking to any sensibility today: every neighborhood where African-Americans lived got a D regardless of other factors. Every white neighborhood was given an A, a B or a C, and proximity to “negro” areas was sometimes listed as a reason why a white neighborhood received a lower assessment than facts would otherwise dictate.

That was in 1937, and it would be unthinkable today for an agency of the federal government to engage in such blatant racism. Even so, the effects of those 75-year-old policies continue to inflict pain in Richmond.

“The areas that were ‘Ds’ are impoverished neighborhoods now, and thedy were not necessarily that at the time [they were assessed],” says workshop participant Cricket White, national director of training and project development for the Richmond nonprofit Hope in the Cities.

The HOLC assessments directly affected property owners’ access to credit and depressed home values in low-rated neighborhoods. Before long, well-to-do people of any race who lived in D neighborhoods left. Poorer ones stayed, concentrating poverty in specific areas. In ensuing decades, policy-makers picked these exact neighborhoods for public housing redevelopment. Today, residents in these neighborhoods face the full gamut of trauma-causing structural problems that plague the urban poor in America: limited access to education, transportation, jobs, healthy food at market prices, and other basic components of comfort, security and dignity.

Another aspect of historic trauma addressed in the THH training is the role of “legacy,” or beliefs and biases in perpetuating trauma rooted in the past. In the case of the HOLC neighborhood assessments in Richmond, an example of this legacy would be modern-day explanations for the poverty that persists in the neighborhoods assigned a “D” rating decades earlier: laziness, irresponsibility, self-destructive choices, and residents’ other personal shortcomings. Using the THH approach, these explanations are seen to be focused on the symptoms of a social illness – a modern injustice – that began with a past harm inflicted by racist policies.

“Even if we are ‘past’ it in terms of policy, we’re not past it in terms of attitudes that people have passed on,” says White.

Identifying, understanding and changing the persisting legacy of trauma-causing events in the past is “the heart of transforming historical harms’ work,” says Hooker, who has been affiliated with CJP for a decade and regularly teaches at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. “Everything else is form and function behind that.”

The THH manual by Hooker and Czajkowski was originally prepared for Coming to the Table, a program developed at ����Vlog that adapted the STAR model to address the specific historical trauma of slavery in America. (Czajkowski now works with the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program at ����Vlog.) The two undertook the project as it became clear that the historic trauma-healing framework developed at Coming to the Table had wide applicability to other historic traumas in other settings. 1

At the April workshop, Hooker encouraged each individual participant to imagine specific steps to begin healing the ongoing traumas connected to their lives.

In Richmond, White and her organization have begun to address the legacy of the HOLC neighborhood assessments by creating a PowerPoint presentation to publicize resources available to address specific problems – e.g., access to transportation – that persist today.

The April training at ����Vlog, attended by nearly a dozen people with varying professional and personal interests in the subject, was one of the first official THH trainings offered through the STAR program. Hooker has also been using the methodology for the past three years in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he is part of an effort to address the city’s history of racism.

Karen B. Froming, assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco, wrote in a follow-up email to Hooker and Barge, “I have found the material to be haunting me as I think about all the ways in which historical harms operate in our lives. While I may do work in Rwanda, it is quite apparent how much work we have to do in this country.”

Several participants said the opportunity to spend two days with other people who share an interest in the understanding and healing of historical trauma provided encouragement.

“It feels good to know you’re not alone doing this stuff,” says Iris de León-Hartshorn, director for transformative peacemaking of Mennonite Church USA. De León-Hartshorn is involved in addressing historical traumas related to boarding and mission schools – including several run by the Mennonite church – where Native American children were sent for assimilation into white American culture.

1. Coming to the Table continues its work confronting the legacy of slavery as an “associate organization” to ����Vlog’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, while the STAR program has begun periodically offering the more general Transforming Historic Harms training.

“There’s been a lot of documentation that interventions from the outside can do more harm than good,” says Lisa Schirch, the director of 3P Human Security and a research professor at ����Vlog’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). “Good intentions aren’t enough.”

With that awareness in mind, many humanitarian and development organizations do trainings to develop “sensitivities” – conflict sensitivity, gender sensitivity, environmental sensitivity – to influence the way their staff design and implement projects. Joining the list recently is “trauma sensitivity,” as articulated by former STAR director Carolyn Yoder in an first published in Monthly Developments magazine.

“[International] agencies were often very, very eager to rush into communities that had been deeply affected by violence without having any real understanding of how [their work] could re-traumatize people,” says Lauren Van Metre, dean of students with the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).

STAR is being tapped to provide trauma-sensitivity training and develop other projects in Washington D.C. In addition to helping participants avoid unintentionally doing harm, STAR helps people rotating through field work to manage their own traumatic responses to extremely difficult work situations.

“The NGOs and the military are looking for trauma programs, and we’ve got one that’s 12 years old, and it’s proven,” says Elaine Zook Barge, current STAR director.

As an example, USIP found that its rule-of-law assessment teams working overseas began to report back that their investigations into traumatic events were causing fresh pain for the people they interviewed. STAR and USIP collaborated for a first training in September 2012, with another scheduled nine months later at USIP headquarters in D.C.

Van Metre says the STAR training at USIP has been particularly valuable for people who have been affected by their extended stints in conflict zones. Through its peacebuilding academy, USIP has also developed its own two-day training based on the STAR methodology.

In a 2009 interview with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, former CJP trauma studies professor Nancy Good said all relief and development workers can benefit from trauma training.

“I don’t think we’re doing our jobs if we’re sending people out to do this really important work and are only training them on things like how to work with building houses and acquiring clean water and sanitation,” said Good, now a wellness consultant with the Washington D.C.-based KonTerra group. “We need to [provide] workers [with] basic knowledge and skills for stress management, trauma healing and resilience.”

Energy, exhaustion and excitement filled my body, brain and spirit as I returned home last Friday afternoon after a week-long training on the campus at ����Vlog.

The excitement was from finishing another successful training and hearing the action plans of the participants that morning outlining how they planned to use the STAR materials in their particular context. A Ugandan participant commented as she left, “This is the first program I’ve found that gives people the opportunity to learn from their own stories and experience – it is usually all based on theories.” Her dream is to integrate STAR into the pre-service and in-service trainings for Peace Corps volunteers in East Africa, particularly those working in post-conflict countries.

The exhaustion was due to the additional stress of a head cold while training as well as the fact that this was the third STAR II training I had facilitated in less than five months – one in Spanish in Bolivia, one in Creole in Haiti and one in English at ����Vlog. Training in Creole via an interpreter was an additional stressor. Nevertheless, it really felt worth it when a Haitian participant told us one night at dinner that “many resources have been flown into Haiti since the earthquake a year ago, but most just flow on out. STAR came and it will stay here.”

The energy comes from all the STAR groups I have the opportunity to work with and witnessing the personal change that happens in a short period of time. It is equally energizing to hear their aspirations for using this training to change society. A Bolivian participant recently explained, “Processing trauma has a lot to do with conflict transformation. The existence of trauma often leads us to paint the ’other’ as the enemy and keeps us from advancing. Look at the collective traumas of the Bolivian people and how we view each ’other.’ The model we’ve learned in STAR will be very important in our work of intervention in specific conflict situations here.”

Excitement, exhaustion, and energy… The journey continues to break cycles of violence and build resilience in individuals and communities!

Of all the programs offered by ����Vlog’s , the 8-year-old program is emerging as the must-do one.

Willroy Grant of Costa Rica returned to ����Vlog this September (’09) for a week-long STAR experience, even though he holds a master’s degree in conflict transformation from CJP and has extensive experience in the field.

He worked in Cuba for from 1998 until 2001. He took classes with almost all of the full-time professors in CJP’s program. He interpreted (English to Spanish) for for restorative justice trainings in Guatemala, accompanied John Paul Lederach to help transform conflict in Colombia, studied with Barry Hart at the Caux Institute in Switzerland, and co-facilitated classes with Lisa Schirch and Nancy Good. He has worked for, or been a consultant to, non-profit organizations working for peace and democracy in Costa Rica since 2001.

Despite his wealth of his credentials and experience, Grant relished taking Level I STAR this fall: “STAR wove together all the different components that make up CJP. It connected many of the pieces of my own life. Everything was present – conflict transformation, restorative justice, mediation, trauma, ritual, the moral imagination, and the arts. Trauma was the common thread.”

Elaine Zook Barge, program director of STAR, half-humorously calls her program “the best hits of CJP.”

Most of the 22 participants in this STAR – which stands for “” – did not come holding masters degrees in the field of conflict transformation. Fellow classmates included a refugee settlement worker, court-employed mediator, clinical psychologist, social worker and trainer with a women’s group. Twelve were from the United States, four were from Canada, and the rest were from six other countries.

One of the Americans was a chaplain, Mark Siler, who ministers to prisoners at Marion Correctional Institution, located in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. “I’ve known for some time about CJP and the work of Howard Zehr and John Paul Lederach through their books,” said Siler. “Then a good friend of mine, Suzanne Walker-Wilson, took Level I and Level II STAR in preparation for serving with MCC in Colombia.

“When she next saw me, she said, ‘I kept thinking of you and your work in prison the whole time I was there’ [in STAR].”

For Siler the word “trellis” comes to mind when thinking of the benefits of STAR. “It gives me a trellis on which to hang what I experience every day in the prison,” he said in an interview for Peacebuilder. “It gives me an answer to the question: ‘What can be grown in a place that can feel very barren, where the system is bent so far from being anything restorative?’

“I’ve done my share of workshops and seminars,” he said, but STAR surpassed them all. A key lesson, he noted, is how trauma changes both our brains and our bodies.

STAR provided what Siler called a “safe space” to explore deep wounds, as well as space to celebrate one’s resiliency and ability to heal from such wounds. He loved a quote he heard at STAR: “Pain that is not transformed is transferred” [Father Richard Rohr].

For Siler, STAR named or described patterns that he sees every day, such as the fact that untransformed pain will be “acted out” in activities that hurt those around oneself or “acted in” by harming oneself through such means as substance abuse, harmful relationships, and suicide attempts.

On the fourth day of STAR, Siler found himself weeping after viewing a documentary film on a wrenchingly inspirational meeting between a woman whose daughter had been murdered and a prisoner who had participated in the act. “I obviously needed to weep, to express the pent-up grief I had been feeling from the work I have been doing… There was safety in the room and permission to let it flow.

“I work in a sea of cyclical violence and trauma. It’s played out in the lives of the men in prison, but also in the staff in the system. There’s a stuckness, a brokenness, that gets entrenched and perpetuated. The staff experience trauma from being part of something that is destructive, that is dehumanizing.”

Siler left STAR feeling that he now has “a fire in me – I can be more intentional in healing the trauma around me.” Siler thinks the volunteers who come to his prison to offer Bible study, worship services, and to otherwise express love would benefit greatly from taking STAR to better understand the sources of violence and trauma, and ways out of the cycle. “Having a lot of heart, concern and love are key, but not enough. The resources and understanding provided by STAR are crucial.”

He just wishes more people could take STAR: “Why can’t more of this happen? The longing I feel for victims, for offenders, for all of us. Why can’t we create space for this to happen, for transformation?” Despite everything he has heard and seen in prison – “I’m with men who have done horrible things… I’m not saying we should just fling the doors open” – he stresses that “there are also really extraordinary human beings, extraordinary prisoners, extraordinary staff, inside the system.” STAR helped Siler to see “there is light everywhere, even there.”

Many people inside and outside of prison know “it isn’t working,” he says. “Even if you just care about the safety of your community – 92 percent of prisoners will get out some day – even if you just care about the wasting of your tax dollars, you have reason to consider the benefits of a STAR or restorative justice approach to the prison system.”

Willroy Grant, who was among the first group of students educated at CJP in the 1990s, will be taking his fresh insights from STAR into his work as a therapeutic counselor and as a member of the pastoral team for his church “right in the middle of the red light district.”

He said if he had taken STAR before getting his master’s degree, “I would have found it very provoking and it would have opened up my appetite to know more.” Taking it years after his master’s degree, “it presented a framework that shows how the need for trauma awareness is central to getting to the root causes of conflict.”

For more information on STAR, visit or phone (540) 432-4651. STAR is offered at two levels. Level I presents the STAR trauma healing framework. Level II, for which Level I is a prerequisite, qualifies you to use STAR materials in your professional or community context and connects you with trauma healing resources and an exclusive online community.

In 2008, there were 23 STAR sessions held in seven states and two countries. In 2009, 33 STAR sessions – a 30 percent increase in one year – have been scheduled in seven states and four countries.

STAR – which stands for Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience – seems to meet a vast array of needs. In December 2007, five Russian citizens affected by the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis in Chechnya (where 334 hostages died) came to ����Vlog and took STAR, with the help of an interpreter. Twenty people from Pakistan sought to come to a September 2009 STAR held at ����Vlog, but were unable to get visas. One CJP MA alumnus , a Pakistani national, thinks he has the solution to that problem: find funding to bring STAR to Pakistan. South of the U.S. border, STAR is being embraced by people hardened and traumatized by struggles against organized crime in Mexico – 10 STAR sessions have been held or scheduled in various locations in Mexico in 2009-10, always in Spanish.

In the United States, Jubilee Partners of Georgia hopes to use STAR to improve its work with refugees, who often arrive traumatized by violence in their home countries. In Michigan, the Christian Reformed Church is exploring STAR as a tool to help church leaders address racism within their church.

Variations of STAR have been developed for:

• youths aged 14 to 20

• villages with low literacy levels (using pictures instead of written words)

• veterans of war

• groups involved in historical traumas, such as the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave-holders (see article on facing page).

Jan Jenner, director of CJP’s Practice & Training Institute, has been involved in STAR since its inception. “It’s been humbling and gratifying to see how many individuals have found STAR helpful in their personal and professional lives, and how many communities have benefited as a result,” says Jenner. “STAR touches deep places in people’s souls. As importantly, it provides knowledge and skills for working through deep hurts held by individuals and communities.”

One of the current challenges is finding funding to offer STAR to community and church leaders wanting to help returning veterans and their families. Says Barge: “STAR could help vets and their families better understand the ‘wounds of war’ and discover wellsprings of resilience and healing.”