Taking In the Whole Picture
Welcome to the May, 2021 edition of our newsletter.
What a complicated world we live in!
Home for Good Coalition is dedicated to embracing complexity — For those of us who make up its core team, this means we’re dedicated to the relational complexity of addressing and supporting one another as we heal our own trauma. We do this because we know how connected we are to the larger community.
We do this because we know that trauma, and healing from trauma, is at the heart of changing the structures of so-called “helping systems.”
We do this because in fact all systems, from foster care to juvenile justice to welfare and beyond, are not really separate. As our co-founder Dr. Rita S. Fierro writes, “Communities become fractured because every parent who is attempting to reunite with their children has to enter and re-enter many different silos to satisfy the multiple requirements of multiple systems.” She skillfully reveals how there is really only one overarching System.
We do this because our model for change prioritizes the voices of parents and families who have been impacted — in fact, traumatized — by navigating those systems. These voices drive all our strategy. They are the real experts!
If we can’t — or won’t — look at the bigger picture, we grab at some small detail to make it explain the whole. It’s like holding a jigsaw puzzle piece close over one eye: the whole world is covered by that tiny shape, but this is a far cry from reality. Trying to create change by working with only one system, separate from the others, is praiseworthy but equally limited.
As a puzzle is being assembled, the patterns that form the big picture come gradually into view. Without those patterns, no picture would exist.
Home for Good Coalition leverages the stories of those impacted by systemic trauma, because through their stories the larger patterns become evident. Sousan Robinson writes about her mixed-race son’s arrest at school and his incarceration in a juvenile justice facility. This graphic gives a breakdown of racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, state by state.
When we look at the bigger picture, we understand how one story represents multiple stories. These patterns, and the individual people whose stories they represent, create the energy that Home for Good is harnessing to transform abusive systems.
As a team we support one another because, as we heal, we come to embrace how connected we really are. We are community. Join us! For more information, check out Home for Good Coalition. To write for us, contact write@ homeforgoodcoalition.com.
