Bright+3 : Grief

Last week Jordan Neely was killed on a New York City subway when a bystander “approached Mr. Neely, put him in a chokehold, and held him until he became limp.” [New York Times]

In Kansas City (Ralph Yarl), New York (Kaylin Gillis), and Atlanta (Heather Roth and Payton Washington) people (notably young people in these examples) have been shot for ringing the wrong doorbell, using the wrong driveway or getting into the wrong car.

There are countless little and big reasons for these events. But in many ways they’re the product of systemic fear and trauma that dehumanizes the people around us.

We’re also living through a pandemic that has killed over a million Americans and continues to have long-term impacts. Climate change is scaling up the reach of natural disasters.

And we live with distraction. Stories about all this. Debates over cause and motive leave little time to focus and little energy with which to be well.

An aside: I write this knowing I’m not mentioning incidents to what happened in the past 10 days in Allen, Texas or Cleveland, Texas or Brownsville, Texas. Those are tragedies. Perhaps greater ones. It’s doubly tragic that we need a language to convey value or gauge impact of these events. How do we write of any of this when there is so much of it?

Recognize the Impact of Trauma

Does it make sense for communities and organizations to better recognize and address the role trauma is playing and will play in lives of their supporters, staff and broader community?

Like it or not, our donors, members and email lists are made up of people constantly struggling with climate disaster, gun violence, inequality and pandemics. There’s a lot of talk about drops in individual giving. Falls (and rises) in giving are most always associated with “the economy.” Perhaps trauma, fear and dehumanization drive people to withdraw from community engagement and membership.

Tying fundraising results and strategies to economic indicators makes sense. But it limits our view of what’s happening and what’s possible.

We can’t only optimize our recruitment, fundraising and testing for those with financial and other forms of security. These audiences will lead us towards policies and politics that favor the fortunate, preserve power and aren’t interested in systemic problems. These are also audiences that may continue to shrink. One can only evade the sources of trauma for so long.

Organizations should also question their role in creating instead of healing trauma. Crisis-driven messaging dominates advocacy and fundraising communications of groups doing wonderful environmental, human rights and social justice work, including those organizing and working alongside communities.

Community Resilience

Our communities, supporters and staff need us to both recognize, solve for and support trauma. That’s a big ask. One far greater than the remit of many (most) nonprofits.

Fortunately, there are models, partners and opportunities to do more of this work and do it better.

The pandemic taught us that organizations can engage in community support beyond our mission.

A team of researchers from the University of California at San Diego and the city of Los Angeles looked at developing trauma resilient communities through community capacity-building in 2021. The team recognized the impact weather disasters and the pandemic had on the ability of communities to feed and shelter people. Over time, these and other events wear down community resiliency.

They found correlation between trauma informed community practices and community health.

We found that capacity-building among community-based partnerships is effective at disseminating trauma-informed education and training, conducting outreach and engagement, linking community members with resources, and increasing help-seeking and social connectedness by community members.

Community capacity to recognize and address trauma will build stronger communities. It may also address fear and our ability to address inequality and justice.

…is community capacity-building a foundational competency that can mitigate the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and flooding or future acts of social injustice?

So why don’t more organizations speak openly about trauma? I think it has such a systemic presence that no group, assuming they acknowledge it at all, sees how they can address it.

Prioritize Novel Community Collaboration

We can debate the causes of inflation and a turn towards austerity-based policies by both parties. But the situation on the ground is that housing, food and job insecurity (or the loss of all three) affects Americans everywhere. Tim Garvin, director of the United Way of Central Massachusetts, recently wrote about the situation in Worcester and the need to remember lessons in community collaboration learned during COVID. The community formed a working group called Worcester Together in March, 2020, and it continues to collaborate:

Worcester Together continues to meet, 1,148 days and counting. It has evolved into a place where observations, news and data are shared, all focused on working together for the good of the community.

Look, I’m no expert on trauma-informed practices. But I do know that offering people resources, support and training to meet their needs best done through community, not individual, practices. And a resilient community, one whose members can rely on and trust one another, is not just able to weather crisis but is also more likely to engage in and support democratic processes.

The rush to community-level innovation we saw in 2020-21 was driven by radical uncertainty. Suddenly, everyone was working remotely. Suddenly, everyone sought ways to provide food and housing assistance. Scott Warren, former CEO of Generation Citizen, wrote about creative collaboration and groups sharing resources for the first time.

But crises wane even if the underlying structures are weakened. Typically, there is little incentive for organizations (or their funders) to invest in or test new collaborations and community building.

I recently spoke to a colleague who spent 18 months piloting sustainable engagement with rural and small community residents who have a social media presence. The goal is to support climate-positive conversation in places that typically only hear and see climate stories from right-leaning TV, radio and social media sources. It’s sensible, not radical, work. But it takes time and isn’t a project that fits neatly into the boxes and sectors into which funders and organizations operate.

Perhaps we’re seeing a shift towards trauma-informed community capacity building. There are efforts to measure community stress and address trauma in educational settings.

But I wonder how (even if) we can prioritize new models of collaboration across disciplines and issues. Can donors, funders and organizations share learning, skills and resources to build community capacity, resilience and relationships to address trauma and instill trust, hope and love instead of fear? If so it may be one way to protect not just our communities but democracy itself.

Should organizations, campaigns and movements that build community or run membership programs do more to acknowledge grief and engage in ways their members experience it?

Many community and nonprofit leaders may nod to the presence of grief and offer some support. We certainly see that in response to natural disasters.

But should acknowledging, confronting and supporting grief be a strong and visible pillar of community and membership programs regardless of organizational mission? I think so. I don’t know what this could or should look like but we all benefit from building community muscle and grief, when we are often at our most vulnerable, is a time to create and strengthen community.

We don’t do grief well…

…and that’s a big problem for our communities, governments and organizations.

Grief is largely unacknowledged within our communities and communications. It’s hard for many people to find, access or feel comfortable seeking grief support.

These seem like community spaces in which people often turn to for grief support: schools, churches and online community resources like Facebook groups and posts as well as GoFundMe campaigns.

That leaves a lot of open space, a lot of missing infrastructure, for community grief. Most of us, I think, live with weak grief communities and language.

Why does this matter? Is it possible that much of our cultural hostility and narrative of polarization is borne of collective grief and anxiety?

If we can’t recognize, share and talk about grief we lose empathy. People experiencing trauma are looking for support. Those lacking empathy and support are often susceptible to extreme actions and beliefs and the communities supporting those actions and beliefs.

Is untreated grief a contributor to broken communities and broken politics? If so, we should address grief at all levels of our community work.

Grief and the future of community

This post began in drafts a few months ago when I jotted down this line:

Is grief a future of community? Would that be good or bad?

The past two years have pushed a lot of collective grief on us: COVID, climate change disasters and a drumbeat of conspiracy theories and geopolitical chaos that leave many (most?) people with higher baseline anxiety if not waves of existential dread.

And, of course, we all experience the loss of friends, parents, children and pets. It’s no surprise that Michelle Zauner’s story of losing her mom to cancer when she was in her mid-20s, Crying in H Mart, has been a NY Times bestseller for seven months now.

We’ve always sought ways to understand and process individual grief. The pandemic and (waves hands) everything. out. there. has brought us heavy collective grief.

In a recent paper, Acknowledging bereavement, strengthening communities: Introducing an online compassionate community initiative for the recognition of pandemic grief, Dr. Deborah Ummel and colleagues look at how access to shared grief support strengthens community:

Compassion and care can establish solidarity needed to center community advocacy: Individuals naturally have the impetus to express solidarity and come together to compassionately support each other and can do so in a way that also tackles wider social injustices, an issue that professionalized, privatized help cannot solve.
Dr. Deborah Ummel

Also consider Dr. Viviana Zelizer’s piece, When We Were Socially Distant, Money Brought Us Closer. Dr. Zelizer looks at the rise in giving during the pandemic. There were more donations to charity. Much more direct giving to people, including mutual aid efforts. At a time of grief and uncertainty, more people used money to build connection to others.

A possible lesson: we invest in community and we invest in others to find footholds and connection in slippery, uncertain times. Grief, personal and the communal grief of the pandemic, can be the most slippery of times in life. As community and membership people we should offer footholds people can hold onto when they’re falling.

I’m not sure what the solution is but it would be good to see community and membership leaders, thinkers and funders investing in grief and how we do it.

Reading material

A few more articles on the intersections of community, membership, solidarity and grief.

”The project is about giving activists and movement organizations what we need to catalyze grief for change.” This is an inspiring conversation with Malkia Devich-Cyril about Malkia’s vision for the Radical Loss Movement.
Coordinates of speculative solidarity by Barbara Adams.
Solidarian storytelling prioritises mutuality and justice over empathy and aid. Rather than maintaining existing conditions and their inherent power dynamics, stories of solidarity seek transformation through conviviality.
“Not supposed to happen in your 20s”: Grieving young adults find support around virtual dinner tables. This Denver Post article from November, 2021, centers on the growth The Dinner Party, a national organization with local groups providing grief support for people age 21 to 45.
How to live in a burning world without losing your mind, by Liza Featherstone. The way out of this confusion is neither feel-good solutionism nor submitting to the apocalypse. Instead, we need to learn to make space, in our conversations, activism, and media, for feeling grief, anxiety, guilt, and fear about climate change, no matter how difficult or dark.
Acknowledging bereavement, strengthening communities: Introducing an online compassionate community initiative for the recognition of pandemic grief by Deborah Ummel, Mélanie Vachon, and Alexandra Guité-Verret.
…online communities constitute a powerful space for community members to gather and advocate for greater awareness of the inequities found in end-of-life care and bereavement services, to denounce abusive situations experienced by many individuals who died from COVID-19 complications, and to fight against the lack of recognition experienced by numerous caregivers.
Loss and grief in the COVID pandemic: more than counting losses and moving on by Alida Herbst.
Helping a Community Understand the Complexity of Grief by Phyllis R. Silverman Ph.D.
American Democracy: A Status Check. This conversation between Jane Coaston (New York Times), Masha Gessen (The New Yorker) and Corey Robin (Brooklyn College) is about interpreting the Jan 6 insurrection a year later. But it’s really a rumination on the chaos of people and communities not able to recognize and cope with perceived losses (aka grief).
Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief.