Pastor leads trauma-informed community development workshop

Rev. Paul Abernathy said the Neighborhood Resilience Project arose after its founding team began to notice the impact of trauma on their community of Hill District in Pittsburgh. 

They developed a sense that it was the largest obstacle faced by the historically Black community, who were not only experiencing it in the present, but had also experienced it for generations.

They began partnering with clinicians, researchers, the University of Pittsburgh, King's College, community members and others to develop a framework. 

Among the locations in the country the organization is looking to serve is Sarasota's historically Black community of Newtown.

From July 30 to Aug. 1, SRQ Strong welcomed the Orthodox Christian priest and his wife, Kristina Abernathy, for a training session on trauma-informed community development, hosted at The Academy at Glengary. 

Change from within

A combat veteran of the Iraq War, Paul Abernathy first learned about PTSD in the Army. He says he has visited the Newtown community three times over the last several years.

He calls Newtown an "extraordinary community" and a "place that I've come to know," with "so much light and wisdom."

Abernathy's history in Sarasota extends back to a past research project in which SRQ Strong was involved, sending women to train with Abernathy in Pittsburgh.

The Sarasota workshop involved 26 different organizations, not including the neighborhood resilience project or the academy itself, as well as 23 people who live in Newtown.

It involved thirty-five local people undergoing training as neighborhood experts, to help gather what executive staff of SRQ Strong say will be a "block-by-block" assessment of residents' experiences in Newtown, that will help the community grow. 

They will be paid for the work of interviewing and gathering data.

Andy Blanch, founder and director of SRQ Strong, said this process is essential to building community resources.

“We’ve been trying to do community development for a really long time, and new projects have been developed, but they don’t always end up being so successful because they’ve been developed by the people at the top, or the developers, or the leaders of the organizations, and so you get a new resource in the community, and it turns out the community doesn’t use the resource," she said.

The organization is working toward the goal of establishing the Newtown Family Center. 

The project is being funded by several organizations besides SRQ Strong, including the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, National Family Support Network, BayFirst National Bank and Dreamer’s Academy.

Photo by Ian Swaby

Abernathy's model also involves observing and tracking a community's progress over time in five different domains: wellness, physical health, emotional health, relationships, spiritual health and financial health.

“We’ve been doing this in Pittsburgh for years, and we’ve had some success, and even more exciting than that is we’ve had some wonderful partnerships around the country with others who are now employing this framework in their own communities and also having success," he said.

“Our hope is eventually, it could go way beyond that, to other parts of Sarasota County as well,” Blanch said.

Shinece Davis, a single mother of four boys and a resident of Newtown, was among the attendees, and said she wanted to thank the organizers of the event for involving the community and seeking their input.

She said her neighborhood faces issues like gun violence, and as her boys were growing up, had to deal with issues like being stopped by the police, bullied or attacked.

“I would love to get out of the neighborhood into a better neighborhood, but at the time, that’s all that we can afford, and that’s what we’re at right now, so I want to be a part, I want to help," she said. 

Photo by Ian Swaby

She said it was a good opportunity to meet "other people who are facing different challenges, or even the same challenges.”

Attendee C’Dara Manuel, a New College of Florida student, said she liked the information and open discussion offered at the workshop.

“I think that when you’re trying to help a community, especially when you don’t necessarily look like the people in that community, it’s important to have people from the community to do some of the groundwork and stuff, just so people feel more comfortable in using the resources, comfortable in taking the initiative to get things done, comfortable in opening up, to be able to let people what’s going on, to gather data and stuff like that," she said.

She said she was able to recognize the experiences of Newtown residents, from her own community in Fort Myers.

“I just think that it’s happening everywhere, and in a lot of communities; it’s happening in the community where I’m from back home, so I think that it’s important to have initiatives like this, and there aren’t many programs that are about this type of thing, definitely not where I’m from, so it was good to be able to have this be brought to me and to be a part of it.”