Listening for A Change: Community engaged inquiry on trauma, healing, and hope for young people in Richmond, CA

The RYSE Youth Center's Listening Campaign is an inquiry of the articulations and experiences of trauma, violence, coping, and healing for young people of color in Richmond, CA.  It examines the legacy and implications of structural inequity vis-a-vis localized conditions of chronic, complex trauma, correlated health and social inequities, collective embodiment of trauma and violence, as well as collective empowerment within and towards healing, hope, and justice.   The aim of the Listening Campaign is to more effectively serve the needs of young people of color in Richmond, CA by 1) understanding their lived experience in the context of ongoing trauma 2) informing more effective community interventions and strategies, and 3) influencing/advocating for institutional policies, protocols, relationships, and investments that are restorative, just, and healing.  This session will share the Listening Campaign as a community-engaged inquiry process to turn up the volume on the voices and priorities of youth of color, gather and analyze local data through the prisms of structural violence, and to cultivate shared values, language, and strategies, as well as mutual accountability and support within and across organizations, structures, and systems.  The session will describe RYSE’s syndemics-oriented framework and application in the Listening Campaign.  A nascent approach within the public health field, a syndemics orientation explicates and integrates structures of power, privilege, and oppression and their intersections to inform structural, institutional, and organizational approaches to 1) eliminating health inequities, and 2) designing and implementing health promoting policies, practices, programs, and investments.