(bright music) (audience applauding) - 15 years ago, I was managing a community mental health center on Chicago's Southwest side, primarily working with young people involved in the criminal legal system.

One day I got a call from a probation officer, asking if I would see her favorite kid, one who she described as alive but dead.

He was involved in the streets, had recently been shot in the back, and had undergone a colostomy procedure.

And she was worried about keeping him alive, but she was also worried about the possibility of him harming someone else.

A few days later, the probation officer shows up in my office with a 17-year-old young man who, we'll call Raphael, and he was exactly as she described, a living body, but with eyes that reflected no life.

And as a freshly-licensed clinical social worker, I thought I had all the tools to help Rafael, however, he quickly showed me otherwise because for the next five sessions, he didn't say more than two words at a time.

And I did all the things that a good community mental health practitioner does, but I couldn't get at the well of pain right under his surface.

And that's when I asked Rafael's permission, if at the next session I could invite an outreach worker, somebody closer to his own life experience.

And his response to me was, "I'm straight, but if you want to, that's fine."

So let me tell you about outreach workers, also called Community Violence Intervention Workers, who are some of the most incredible people that I have ever met.

They're what we call homegrown peacemakers, grassroots leaders seeking to prevent and intervene in violence in neighborhoods with the highest rates of crime.

A week later, Raphael is now back in my office, accompanied by an outreach worker who would later have an impact on my life.

What then occurred completely transformed everything that I thought I knew about healing.

Briefly, the outreach worker gave glimpses into his own life of growing up with violence in his home, losing friends to violence, getting involved in the streets, and eventually serving time in prison.

That brief, authentic connection, however, completely unlocked something in Raphael.

And for the next two hours with tears streaming down his face, Raphael surfaced a life of pain and trauma.

It was the first time, however, though that I saw life in his eyes.

I went home that night reflecting on what I observed, and I actually prayed about that outreach worker and I prayed that his impact would be multiplied, because I realized that true peacekeeping must involve healing at its core.

And furthermore, the most effective healers are those who themselves have been wounded.

Today I wanna talk to you about these healers, these Community Violence Intervention Workers who step in between bullets in their targets, who return to their places of pain to help others find a way out.

Because I've discovered something that we're missing, the healers themselves need healing.

What if healing and not hurt became the lens through which they approached their work?

I'll tell you now how I came to this realization.

A few years after that encounter with Rafael, I left community mental health to oversee community violence interventions in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood.

I supervised a team of over 100 peacekeepers working to prevent and intervene in violence in homes and in schools on the streets, and through coalition-based work.

Now, when I came from mental health into violence intervention work, I quickly realized the toll of peacekeeping on the peacekeepers.

Let me tell you what I saw.

They attend dozens of funerals a year, often of their own program participants, but even of their own family members or coworkers.

They are regularly, if not daily, exposed to gun violence and homicide scenes, and they place their own personal safety at risk as they seek to intervene in these situations.

And over the course of their work, they are forced to confront and relive their own past traumas of violence and incarceration.

Now, the science on trauma tells us that just one adverse experience, like the loss of a loved one or exposure to violence can have significance, long-term, negative effects on someone's wellbeing, which includes their mental and emotional, spiritual, and physical health.

These effects include chronic traumatic stress disorders, social isolation, substance misuse, but imagine a lifetime of these experiences compounded and layered by the relentless exposure to trauma, and violence, and loss.

It's not just trauma, but the relentless cycle of re-traumatization that peacekeepers endure while trying to create peace for others.

What does that do to a person?

That realization made me wanna develop solutions for our frontline peacekeepers, and I was going to do this as a social work scholar who conducts community engaged research.

I am an assistant professor at the Jane Adams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois Chicago.

And I returned to my roots in violence intervention to develop solutions for our frontline peacekeepers.

I conducted a study engaging the frontline voices and experiences of those doing the peacekeeping work to identify the resources that they needed for their wellness to thrive.

My study examined the traumatic stress they experience and their life experiences that led them to do that kind of work.

Now, the findings revealed something super important.

Organizations must invest in worker wellness strategies as a foundation for sustainable impact.

These strategies include creating access to mental health resources, creating peer support spaces, and fostering organizational cultures that value rest and recovery.

When these strategies are invested in, they send a really important message to our peacekeepers.

Your worth extends beyond your past and what you produce.

You are valued for the incredible person who you are and the leader that you are becoming.

Let me introduce you now to a colleague and collaborator of mine who we'll call Lamont, somebody who embodies both the promises and challenges of Community Violence Intervention.

Growing up on Chicago South side, violence wasn't just a neighborhood issue for Lamont, it was a family issue.

He was born into a family with intergenerational gang involvement, a lifestyle choice that became his own, and that landed him in a 10-year prison sentence.

However, when Lamont came out of the Illinois Department of Corrections, he was determined to become the mentor that he did not have when he was growing up, and he threw himself into community violence intervention work, becoming a mentor for high-risk young men and women, helping them find jobs, and Lamont even went back to school.

So from the outside, Lamont seems unstoppable, but he had never paused to heal.

Behind the scenes, Lamont is running on fumes and burning the candle from both ends, heading towards a crash.

And along that way, nobody ever stopped Lamont and asked him, "How are you holding up?"

That's why my first wave of research and implementation in Chicago focused on developing support strategies for outreach workers like Lamont, examining their experiences and engaging the recommendations and perspectives of our peacekeepers in developing wellness initiatives by them and for them.

And then I expanded my research to other cities like Denver, and Kansas City, and Boston.

And while I was encouraged to seeing wellness initiatives being developed, a deeper layer of the issue emerged.

What if healers don't think healing is for them?

Further research revealed that sometimes Community Violence Intervention teams are resistant to the idea of wellness.

They see it as irrelevant or impractical.

I showed up at an agency after a frontline worker had been shot in the face and survived and was told by one of the staff, "This is just part of the territory.

We grind and we keep going."

I had outreach workers tell me, "Rest?

who's got time for rest?

My community needs me."

But here's the truth, burnout does not check your availability, it just books itself in.

So let's go back to Lamont now, who was grinding himself into the ground, who had never paused to heal because it all caught up with him.

Lamont made a decision that landed him back in prison, and that's when he had his wake-up call.

Unless he faced his trauma, Lamont could not fully show up for his community, for his family, or for himself.

And my research identified that this is actually a pretty common archetype in Community Violence Intervention, of the tireless hero, individuals driven by a deep sense of responsibility to serve their community often because they feel the need to atone for harm that they have caused in the past.

And this is admirable, but it comes at a steep, personal cost, their health.

What's needed is a fresh approach, one that values healing as much as service.

When Lamont hit his critical reflection point, Lamont chose to heal.

And that began with acknowledging all of the harm that he had caused others when he was operating from a place of unresolved trauma.

Lamont got professional counseling, he got coaching, and began unpacking decades of that pain.

As Lamont healed, his career flourished, and today he leads one of the city's largest peacekeeping teams, nationally recognized for his efforts, but not just for the leader who he is, but for the healing he embodies.

When Lamont chose to heal, his impact multiplied.

Today I have a message for our funders, and for our public officials, and for our advocates in Community Violence Intervention.

We must stand with our peacekeepers and their healing journey.

Community Violence Intervention must be re-imagined as a movement rooted in healing, and we need to get at the unjust trauma at the core of this work.

This requires rethinking how we hire, and train, and support our frontline peacekeepers.

But I also have a message for our Community Violence Intervention Workers.

Your wellbeing is the foundation of your community's strength, and healing is always possible, but it does require taking that first step.

While you should have never had to endure the trauma that you've experienced, the real loss is in leaving that healing work undone because when you do not heal, you leave untapped potential, both yours and your communities on the table.

Now, this is where my story comes full circle.

Do you remember that initial encounter at Raphael and the outreach worker that I prayed about?

Well, the outreach worker didn't just transform lives in the community, he transformed mine.

(audience laughing) (audience applauding) My husband Eddie Bocanegra.

(audience applauding) And together we have brought nine, nine incredible children into this world who are part of our combined peacekeeping mission.

A decade ago, we could have only imagined the progress that we're seeing in Community Violence Intervention.

The stories of Eddie and Lamont's, and countless others remind us of the incredible beauty that can come from complete devastation, that when we invest in the healing of peacekeepers, we breathe life into their work and into their communities.

The same life that I saw spark in Raphael's eyes buried under all of that pain and trauma.

And the beauty of it is that their victories don't just belong to them.

Their victories belong to all of us, proving that when we lift up our peacekeepers, we all rise.

So let's not just dream of a safer future, let's start creating it, one healed life at a time.

(audience applauding) (bright music)