Executive committee members with Multnomah County’s Local Public Safety Coordinating Council (LPSCC) heard moving testimony on Monday, March 14, on the work underway to support hope and healing in the community.
The meeting featured presentations from two local change makers. Lisa Saunders, executive director of FaithBridge, shared about how her nonprofit organization is helping women — particularly Black women and other women of color — emerge from trauma to reconnect in a life-transforming and faith-affirming way. Dr. S. Renee Mitchell, founder of I Am M.O.R.E. (Making Ourselves Resilient Everyday), spoke about how her organization develops and transforms the lives of local youth.
LPSCC executive committee meetings are generally spent addressing the multitude of systemic issues within the local criminal legal and public safety systems, which can often overshadow the importance of hope, healing, restoration and joy.
That’s why a few weeks ago, LPSCC’s co-chairs, Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury and Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, “talked about spending time in this space to acknowledge the moment that we’re in, but also to acknowledge the incredible work that people are doing to meet this moment by helping others heal and hope,” Kafoury said.
Dr. S. Renee Mitchell, I Am M.O.R.E.
Watch the presenters, in their own words, here.
Words cannot fully define Dr. S. Renee Mitchell. As a speaker, trainer, educator, “heARTivist,” poet, performer, writer, and advocate for youth voices, her accomplishments and accolades are many.
In 2019, she received the Spirit of Portland award, nominated by Portland Commissioner Nick Fish. And in 2021, she received Multnomah County’s Gladys McCoy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her distinguished career includes 25 years as a journalist, including a decade at The Oregonian. She spent four years teaching at Roosevelt High School in North Portland, where she founded her current organization, I Am M.O.R.E, a strength-based program designed to cultivate resilience and a culture of belonging in traumatized youth.
“I am an expert in culturally relevant, trauma-informed practices and social, emotional learning,” said Mitchell. “I’ve done a lot in the community related to creativity” — from poetry to plays to creative opera.
But all of that success belies a difficult childhood that she says has helped her understand and connect with the youth she serves.
“What people don’t seem to understand about my story is that I grew up with a lot of trauma,” said Mitchell.
During the meeting, she read a poem reflecting her experiences called, “Thought You Knew”:
Oh you think you know me. As if you can squeeze my reality into some neat and tidy categories, but my existence is more than superfluous words all strung together in harmonious chords.
You see my mental expanse is sacred. I’m fighting bitterness and anger on a daily basis and I’m threading my heart and I’m praying it mends.
So try to understand what you cannot comprehend and be prepared to be impressed.
You see you thought you knew, but you really just know my name. You thought you knew, but you really don’t know my pain.
Growing up as the only Black student in her school, Mitchell’s scars were invisible. She excelled at school, but suffered from trauma and bullying, both in and out of school.
“I didn’t really know how to process the pain that I was experiencing and how it led to multiple bouts of depression, thinking of suicide, distress, self-sabotage, anger, resentment and very self critical,” said Mitchell.
“But I am so much more than people think I am and what I have experienced.”
Schools as sites of suffering
When Mitchell became the only Black teacher at Roosevelt High School, she wanted to offer her students what she never received as a young person.
“A lot of what I experienced is based in racial oppression and other types of trauma,” she said. “I try to help them understand their own power and their brilliance and their capacity for brilliance.”
Mitchell revived the Black Student Union and the school’s Black History Month assembly. She also founded the Black Girl Magic Club with money from the City of Portland’s Office of Youth Violence Prevention.
While researching and writing her doctoral dissertation, Mitchell found data showing that Black youth are the most traumatized adolescent group, with that trauma coming amid a developmental period when youth are trying to figure out who they are in their relationship with their peers and within society, said Mitchell.
“Because of the trauma they experience, particularly racial trauma, it seeds these patterns that they can’t get out of.”
In her dissertation, Mitchell described the phases of anti-Blackness that organize the whole social context of how Black children go through life: hidden rage, grief, self-hatred, shame, unhealthy behaviors and not being able to sleep.
Mitchell referred to the countless barriers that Black children and families face that contribute to their trauma: the bias of medical providers and police; the absence of community-based culturally specific services that are critical to healing and hope; even the economic system that sees Black families work more hours but earn less than white households.
“All of this sets Black children up to fail even in the time before they’re born,” said Mitchell.
“So I felt like there was a need to really tease out this information to have a deeper context of why this was an issue,” she said. “Schools are a site of suffering for a lot of Black students — so they’re holding onto a lot without a lot of ways to heal. And then, children are blamed.”
Hope and healing from trauma through I Am M.O.R.E.
As founder of I Am M.O.R.E, Mitchell has understood the magnitude of the challenges that stand in the way of the hope and healing required to get lives on track.
I Am M.O.R.E. focuses on three steps, said Mitchell:
- “Inside-out”: Raising critical consciousness. Recognize that Black youths’ negative feelings are justified and inner rage can be rechanneled. Help transform their relationship with past trauma, capitalize on a student’s strengths, and stimulate their intrinsically motivated resilience.
- “Outside-up”: Social justice activism. Set up a structure to help youth find their sense of purpose. Give them the tools to critically analyze their environment. Give youth an opportunity to use their voice and wisdom to create social change.
- “Up and Beyond”: Arts and creativity. Give youth public platforms to share their knowledge and wisdom. Hold a safe space for adults to see, hear and celebrate youth voices at the center. Give youth paid opportunities to speak, train and facilitate.
“With these three steps, what we believe as adults is that we are not the heroes of these young people’s stories,” said Mitchell. “We are the master gardeners of who they can become. With any seed you don’t have to tell it to be a plant, be a weed, be a tree, be a flower — it’s already embedded in the DNA of that seed and that’s what we believe about Black youth.
“And what you see is the theory of change — that when I am in my power, I empower.”
Today, Mitchell is also the program manager for the City of Portland’s inaugural Black Youth Leadership Development Program called R.I.S.E., or Radically Inspiring Spaces of Empowerment. The work unfolds at the Soul Restoration Center on Northeast Killingsworth Street, located in the old Albina Arts Center, an historic gathering space used in the 1960s and 70s by Black community members. It’s now called the Soul Restoration Center.
“There’s history there,” said Mitchell. “There’s ancestral resilience. Nurturing, teaching, empowering and remembering. We focus on hope, healing and self-love.”
Research shows that healing happens while people are in community, she noted.
“We heal when we know there are people around us who see us and make us feel like we belong,” said Mitchell. “We are leveraging the influence of other people and organizations who care about Black youth to create this bigger picture of how we heal.”
Mitchell’s work is affecting the greater community. I Am M.O.R.E. is working with Portland Public Schools to create a culturally focused social-emotional curriculum particularly for Black students.
And as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, Mitchell recognized the need for more joy in the community. So she spearheaded the intergenerational Spreading Black Joy campaign.
“We created projects such as ‘The Black Nod,’” a film about the gesture of acknowledgement, said Mitchell, “which is what we do in the Black community when we see each other, especially in environments that are predominantly white.”
“I realized what I needed most of all was joy, and if I needed joy, so many other people needed joy.”
Lisa Saunders, FaithBridge
“Thank you all for being willing to hear us and center what I and Dr. Mitchell describe as Black healing, Black hope and Black joy,” said Lisa Saunders, who followed Mitchell’s presentation.
Saunders is the executive director of FaithBridge, an organization that provides opportunities for women emerging from trauma and/or a life transition to reconnect with their faith in a deep and life-transforming way.
A FaithBridge participant might be someone leaving incarceration or in treatment, or maybe a single mother who is simply overwhelmed, she said.
“It’s that young girl who is acting out in ways that teachers and the community may not understand — but it’s really her trauma. It’s the mothers, grandmothers and aunties. It’s every one of us who had to bury our children and our youth at too young of an age, and still can’t shake the grief,” said Saunders. The women who participate in FaithBridge are those confronting “generational trauma that’s rolled downhill.”
FaithBridge helps participants release and reconcile with their harm, reclaim their voices, and ultimately recover their whole and healthy identity.
Saunders stressed that her program leads Black women through trauma, healing and recovery work from a faith-centered perspective, but not any specific faith tradition.
“It’s not a faith-based program. Any woman of any faith is welcomed to join in,” she said.
The program is centered on faith because Black women, in particular, have lives closely interwoven with faith. According to a Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study, 84% of Black women surveyed said religion is important, said Saunders. In times of turmoil, about 86% of Black women — more than any other group — identified faith in helping them get through tough times.
She also cited work from the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior about African American women in extreme poverty who were also experiencing food insecurity. Providing food alone wasn’t enough to help those women heal from the rest of the trauma in their lives, Saunders said.
“They had a need for spiritual food aside from the need for actual, physical food,” she said. “They referred to chronic stress in their lives and the lack of ways to effectively deal with them. It produces physical nervousness and pain that prevents them from eating.”
As a certified peer support specialist in adult mental health, as well as an ordained minister, Saunders designed the program she would have wanted for herself.
The program uses a four-month,16-module curriculum called “Live Again” that women attend once a week.
The model of healing through FaithBridge goes beyond just being trauma-informed. It’s focused on “Healing-Centered Engagement,” which includes:
- Culturally grounded programming that views healing as restoration of identity,
- Asset-driven programming that focuses on well-being rather than symptoms to suppress.
There are incentives to participate and stay in the program.
“I pay women in the program to do the work of healing because it’s hard work to heal, and so often we’re tasked with the burden of healing and no one ever resources us to do that work,” said Saunders. “I want to resource the women who come into the program to do the work.”
Saunders named her curriculum “Live Again” after her mother, who was the last living person in her immediate family before she passed away.
“I was in a very deep dark depression of grief,” said Saunders. But channeling her mother helped Saunders realize that her mother would have wanted her to live again.
Saunders' mother came from a long line of gospel singers. Her father came from a long line of pastors. Both dealt with immense, intergenerational trauma.
“My parents loved us and cared for us well, but even though we had everything we needed — from the outside world it looked like a great family — my home was not always pleasant,” she said.
Her brother suffered from substance use. Her sister suffered from an abusive relationship. Saunders became adept at breaking up fights.
“And I became proficient at over-performing so that no one knew my family was dysfunctional and I became the bright star,” she said. “I did all the things that leadership kids do: sports, student council, cheerleading, community volunteer work. I was a debutant. I was the one who was supposed to soar.”
By the time she was 26 years old, Saunders was a single mother of two and reeling from trauma following a toxic and emotionally abusive relationship.
She pushed through by rediscovering her faith.
“My story is not unique,” she said. “Some reside in the hushed silence of survival. We all carry wounds. But trauma will have its say.”
Saunders continued: “Right now in our community, trauma is having its say. Trauma is having its say with every gunshot, relapse and senseless murder.… We have to deal with the core issues. My community is suffering from great trauma. So we are raising this issue now, because it is at a tipping point. We ask ourselves, is healing even possible?
Answering “no” to that question, she said, just “isn’t an option.”
Today, FaithBridge’s offices are on Northeast Killingsworth Street, in the Albina Arts Center, next door to Dr. Mitchell’s I Am M.O.R.E. space.
“I’m in the space that I went to preschool 52 years ago,'' she said. “The Albina Arts building has a special place in my heart.”
FaithBridge’s trauma, healing and recovery work is part of Multnomah County Public Health investments designed to address the root causes of crisis and violence.
While healing and recovery are at the forefront — the work encompasses hope, healing, restoration and, least not, joy.
“Healing means unabashed joy,” said Saunders. “It looks like a system that expects us to heal and in authentic and soul-nourishing ways where my culture is respected and heard.”
“It’s a recognition that place, space and community matter and it nourishes my soul.
“Life is a compilation of many moments, the good, bad, ugly and life-altering. But when we choose to center not just treatment, but hope, healing, restoration and joy.
“Yes, joy!”