Talk & Do: Steps to Get From Crisis Response to Community Healing (Part 2)

On May 6, Minnesota Women’s Press staff member Olivia Worcester hosted the second of our discussions with mental health specialists about how community can best respond to the latest traumas experienced in Minnesota: the targeting of Minnesotans with immigrant roots by ICE as well as the upstanders and caregivers who have supported them. Participants in the conversation included:

• Alfreda Daniels, cofounder of Black Immigrant Collective, who immigrated in 2006 as a refugee from Liberia
• Comfort Dondo, founder of Phumulani, which offers dignity and resources for immigrant survivors of trauma, could not attend this second discussion but shared her perspectives in written form
• Hopewell Hodges, who is finishing her doctorate in clinical child psychology and has shared insights about how to talk with children about deportation and negative stereotyping
• Tanya Kennedy, licensed clinical counselor with more than 20 years of experience and a private practitioner of Peace Be Still
• Molly Peterson, director of adult programs at NAMI Minnesota (National Alliance on Mental Illness)
• Ana Mariella Rivera, psychotherapist in private practice for 18 years and adjunct professor in social work at the University of St Catherine 

The conversation opened with an acknowledgement from Ana Mariella Rivera that, in the response to ICE, we have seen a capacity for connection — how do we sustain that connection without needing a crisis to activate it? 

As the discussion evolved, an underlying suggestion was to redefine healing as not simply an individual process, but one that is relational and communal. Can more members of community understand the nature of trauma so that a person’s experience and needs are validated — without requiring them to prove their stories are worthwhile, or asking them to rehash the trauma? What can we all do to make communities feel safer for people who have experienced trauma within it?

A purpose of these Talk & Do conversations with mental health specialists is to identify just that: How can communities offer ongoing forms of mutual aid, compassion, and inclusive experiences of celebration and joy?

Step One: Understand that trauma is ongoing 

Daniels: People aren’t simply healing from events of a few months ago but living amidst systems and environments that keep retraumatizing. The gaps are not simply about providing services, but about creating consistent safety — otherwise healing will remain fragile.

Peterson: With attacks on Medicaid, and the threat of the closure of Hennepin County Medical Center — a vital emergency care hospital that serves the state, including the uninsured — additional loss of safety nets is traumatizing people in new ways, “sending the message that they’re less worthy than other people who can access other or ‘better’ levels of service.” We continue taking away resources from our most vulnerable people. How can we improve infrastructure and the ways communities step up when systems fail us?

Hodges: With news attention lessened, as deportation work continues in less visible ways, “the resources — financial, social, practical, emotional — that families relied on to get through January and February are now depleted in a lot of ways. Many families and individuals are good at adapting to stress in the short term, but that capacity to adapt is not infinite. One of my mentors, Dr. Ann Masten, talks about a rubber band that you can stretch and stretch and stretch — but there’s a point where you stretch and it snaps. When families face new difficulties like eviction, or even more common issues like a child struggling socially in school, the capacity to adapt to those challenges is going to be lower because of what they went through this winter.”

As someone who works in pediatrics, Hodges added, the phenomenon of “cascades” is common: what happens in one part of a child’s development can impact things later. “When you can build a kid’s academic skills early on, it ends up having a positive cascade into their social skills. They’re confident at school, they have a positive self-image, they end up having stronger social skills to interact with others, and that can help protect them against depression down the line.”

Even six weeks of learning online, or not being able to develop confidence as a learner in a classroom, can have a negative cascade into their social skills and into their mental health risks, she said. “These systems are changing so rapidly, and all of these different domains of a kid are closely related and always influencing each other.

“I suspect that we are not yet starting to see the mental health impacts of what’s happened in the Twin Cities.”

One of the mental health specialists shared the example of a client with a young child, who was protected by community during the peak of the ICE occupation, including temporary lodging and transportation that was safer. When she re-entered her previous home, she found that a water pipe had burst and caused extensive water damage. She has long been resilient — including as someone who left her family to immigrate to Minnesota — but the recent loss of her home, and the cumulative stress, broke her coping capacity.

In her written comments, Comfort Dondo shared: “We must understand that communities impacted by immigration enforcement carry long-lasting trauma — fear, housing instability, disrupted family systems, retraumatization, and deep mistrust. We cannot assume that because an operation ends, life simply returns to normal. It does not. There must be intentional post-care infrastructure — healing retreats, culturally grounded recovery spaces, legal stabilization, housing support, mental wellness circles, and long-term accompaniment for families trying to rebuild safety.”

Step Two: Don’t retraumatize vulnerable populations

Dondo: “We must move away from systems that repeatedly ask survivors to reopen wounds in order to prove pain. Visibility does not always have to mean disclosure.”

Kennedy: We’ve confused visibility with exposure. Visibility should feel empowering. ‘I get to tell my own story.’” Yet many people feel pressured to “prove” their suffering publicly in order to receive support or validation. People should have a choice of engaging in healing spaces without having to disclose or amplify their pain for audiences, institutions, or funders. “We also need to normalize that healing can be quiet” — not every story must be publicly shared to be legitimate. We must stop asking “What’s wrong with this person?” and instead ask, “What happened, and what is still happening around them?”

Hodges: Rather than require people to explain their trauma repeatedly, trauma-informed systems should “assume trauma exposure.” She described classrooms and medical settings where professionals are trained to approach everyone with compassion and sensitivity without demanding disclosure. “The hope is that we are trained to be hospitable,” she explained. This approach benefits everyone, not only those with obvious trauma histories or who might be triggered in these spaces.

Step Three: Support caregivers and helpers

Daniels: In discerning what is needed next for community support, can we also take a pause to consider how caregivers need to slow down and take care of selves — how can we prioritize healing for the healers? “Burnout is real. Roundtables with other mental health professionals are rejuvenating because our experiences get normalized in different voices, different faces. So, community definitely helps, but it’s not enough on its own. We need policy changes. We need better funding. We need systems that prioritize mental health workers as humans and not just resources. Because if we are the people who are supposed to be holding everyone up, and we feel unsupported, then the whole system eventually will collapse, right? Because you can’t pour from an empty cup. Where does the rock go for help?”

Hodges: “I’ve also been talking about the rock. A lot of people expect to be strong like a rock is strong — you can pound and crush it, and it’s going to look the same. It can bear a lot of weight. But that’s not the only way to think of strength. A bridge is also strong, but it’s strong because it’s connected at a lot of points and because there are people who check on it regularly to make sure it’s not carrying more than it’s supposed to. It’s strong because people have invested in it.”

Peterson: “Teachers and health care providers and mental health professionals still haven’t been getting the support they need, post-Metro Surge, post-murder of George Floyd, post-Annunciation shooting. We continue to ask them to step up because that’s their role. And at what point does that rubber band snap?”

Rivera described using ancestral healing practices — such as cacao rituals, storytelling circles, and community gatherings — to help people process stress and fear connected to particular ancestral wisdoms. She wonders if this could be a useful option for circles of providers who are exposed to compounding stress. “For our nervous system, we need ways of letting go, resetting, not holding everything internally in our bodies — as Alfreda was saying.” 

In ancestral ritual, there are ways to provide healing spaces that offer community without necessarily needing to rehash the past. Rather the circles are about “finding ways to root that distress, that nervous system that is holding so much.” 

Rivera said she recently hosted an opportunity for people to write down their fears and whatever needed to be let go. She burned those papers in a fire ritual that was “grounding and powerful. There’s already so much wisdom in our communities that we can tap into. It will be great to have support from other organizations to give people that respite that is so necessary.”

Step Four: Imperfect systems need new designs

One point raised is that community care alone cannot compensate for systemic oppression and harm. We ask people who are being traumatized to help create stronger systems or stronger ways of responding, which is hard when you are still stuck in those systems.

On the other hand, people who are directly impacted can sometimes arrive at a solution quickly, because they know it so well. When there were not yet resources to help with food needs, Daniels said, “We emptied our cupboards to share with neighbors. We couldn’t wait for grants to come through.”

Peterson: “We talked last time about how siloed so many parts of our system are from one another, and that it was amazing to see mutual aid during the winter offer wraparound services that made everything so easy for folks who were in need of resources. They were able to go to one place and get rent assistance, money, food, and maybe childcare or transportation. We don’t do that in our everyday systems, which are incredibly segmented. It is constantly retraumatizing people every time they have to go to a new service and reintroduce themselves in detail about why they need it. I’m eager to see an investment in wraparound services, including with the people who are always doing this mutual aid work and maybe not getting the recognition or resources.”

Kennedy: It is important to “stop designing systems for people, rather start building with them.” What works historically with one group might not work with another, so a starting place might include doing elementary-level needs analysis in a community.

“Who are your informal healers? Are they the aunties, the faith leaders, the neighbors who they already trust? We also need to do a shift from extraction to relationship — I think that’s what you were touching on before Ana. People are more willing to share when they understand why, and when they see the benefit. The why and collaboration is key.”

Hodges: In the United States, therapy often means bringing an individual into a room by themselves to sit still and talk about hard things. “For a lot of people, this won’t be what their brains need. One model of trauma healing I use a lot in my work is the neuro-sequential model, which says that before anyone can reason through experiences with their logical minds, you first have to help them regulate — which might involve dance, cultural practice, music, physical movement. Then they have to feel connected and safe in relationships. Regulating and relating often need to happen upstream, before language can be the most helpful to them. I see this with children all the time, but I believe this is true for adults too.”

Daniels: Healing spaces do not need to resemble traditional Western therapy — but simply being in conversation with people in the community. Healing might involve soccer and basketball, church gatherings, barbeques, art, music, or simply safe communal spaces. “The thing about sharing is that you have to find a way to heal the wound once you open it. And maybe you’re draining it, but you’re not healing the wound, so now it is infected and spreads. So, listen to community and see what’s best for healing first before sharing. I think it’s easier for people to share once they’re healed. We need to prioritize that.”

Dondo: “We need more funding directed toward prevention and healing — not only crisis response, and policies that recognize healing as essential infrastructure. The truth is simple: When community is healthy, families are stronger. When families are stronger, children thrive. When children thrive, our future heals. And that works belongs to all of us.”

Step Five: Emphasize community-based support 

Hodges: “What I hope will come out of this winter are a reinvestment in mutual aid that is community-organized and led. There was a new level of civic mindedness, of people knowing their rights, and stepping into advocacy, and that is probably going to help our community in the long term. I hope that continues to grow. Then there are also the relational networks. I have people in my life who did not know anyone who had moved from another country, and now they do. That is whole-community resilience. These systems could keep being strengthened if they keep being nurtured.”

Hodges described how crises create “cascades” in child development. Interruptions such as school closures, displacement, or family instability can damage confidence, social development, and long-term mental health. She warned that society has “not yet started to see the mental health impacts” these crises will have on children over time. “The main way a young child samples stress in the bigger world is through the people they interact with directly. Children picked up on Operation Metro Surge through the way that their caregivers, neighbors, and teachers were affected by it. One of the most important things you can do to protect kids in the long term is to protect the grown–ups directly around them.”

Rivera: “In the midst of a crisis, there’s a lot of interest and desire to take action, jump in, help, because the trauma mobilizes people’s capacity to respond. But as the crisis [becomes less intense], how can we — including media — create visibility in ways that preserve the dignity of communities, as well as agency and emotional safety? Creating spaces for us to come together, to process and talk about what we’re seeing — how it’s impacting not only the communities we work with but ourselves — and how are we sustaining ourselves? There was a lot of media coverage about how communities were harmed and impacted. But that same visibility can include storytelling, community action, and cultural expressions that lead to public conversations.”

Dondo: “People become sick through isolation, loss of culture, and disconnection from community. … One light-hearted but deeply meaningful moment recently has been witnessing women gather in joy — not around crisis — but around healing. Sharing food. Laughing. Dancing. Holding hands. Remembering themselves beyond survival. Those moments are medicine. They remind us that healing is not only the absence of harm — it is the restoration of joy.”

In sum, participants agreed that community healing will continue to require both grassroots mutual aid — including both celebration and compassion — and systems reform. Healing individual and collective trauma, including for caregivers, begins by building safety and trust within community. Not simply talk but do.

 

 “DO” Steps 

1. Treat trauma as ongoing, not temporary
2. Adopt trauma-informed community practices
3. Build safer, more compassionate community spaces
4. Support and sustain caregivers
5. Redesign systems around relationships, not bureaucracy
6. Center regulation, connection, and safety before intervention
7. Strengthen community-based mutual aid networks
8. Prioritize children by supporting the adults around them
9. Reframe healing as collective infrastructure

 Tips 

• Healing is relational, not only individual. 
• Safety and trust are prerequisites for recovery. 
• Community care cannot replace systemic reform, but systems must learn from community care. 
• Joy, culture, and connection are forms of medicine. 
• Mutual aid should become permanent infrastructure, not temporary emergency response. 
• Sustainable healing requires both grassroots action and institutional change. 
• Communities heal best when people are seen, supported, and not forced to prove their pain.

To support our Talk & Do series:

Resources

• MACMH.org presentation
• MACMH.org slide show