Wasco County overall reported zero juvenile arrests during the typically rowdy spring break of 2013, the lowest level of juvenile crime in history, said Trudy Townsend, trauma-informed care coordinator for the Creating Sanctuary in the Columbia River Gorge movement who now leads community health development projects through the Columbia Gorge Coordinated Care Organization for PacificSource.
“We’re working to transform our community,” Townsend told her audience at the Oregon Health Authority’s resilience speaker series. “Our original goal was to rescript the future.”
The Dalles has a long history of trauma -- from the building of The Dalles dam in the 1950s on the sacred Celilo Falls fishing site to more recent racial profiling of Latinos and even the merger of two school districts.
Calling these events “trauma,” Townsend said building relationships across law enforcement, education, juvenile justice, child welfare and mental health leadership was key. “We all had the same goal. We were ready to move.”
The sanctuary movement in The Dalles benefited from getting many community members on the same page -- with shared knowledge, values, language and habits or practices. Trainings to teach sanctuary ways of operating “when emotions get really big” were open to anyone including nonprofits, public health, the faith community, even the business community.
Then those organizations underwent cultural change and adapted the practices for the groups they serve – from tiny tots in Head Start to adults.
Because many people involved represented organizations serving five counties – Wasco, Sherman and Hood River counties in Oregon and Skamania and Klickitat counties in Washington – the local sanctuary model quickly became regional.
Townsend reminded her audience that racial traumas plague cities all across the country, while in Oregon, many communities are being traumatized by wildfires..
“Take risk in order to create big change,” Townsend said. “Change the question to ‘what’s happened to you?”
Jan can be reached at [email protected].
If you value this story from The Lund Report and others like it, support our matching challenge grant today! All donations made to The Lund Report by October 31, 2015 will be doubled. Click here for details.
