By Vichi Jagannathan and Seth Saeugling, Rural Opportunity Institute Co-Founders
At Rural Opportunity Institute (ROI), we often say that trauma is a systems problem, not just a personal one. The same is true for resilience. When communities are given the space, resources, and trust to heal and design their own solutions, systems change becomes possible. And when funders participate in the healing process – not just as supporters, but as equal parts of both the problem and the solution – transformation is inevitable.
Over the past eight years, we’ve learned this truth firsthand. What began as a series of community meetings in our small rural community in the heart of the North Carolina Black Belt, has grown into a statewide movement of educators, social workers, police officers, parents, and young people working alongside funders and policymakers to collectively transform how institutions understand and respond to trauma. Through our work we have been able to engage and impact over 40,000 rural residents, and that number is still growing.
The movement that is now ROI began with a simple question: what is the highest-leverage action that we as former teachers can take to support the well-being of kids and families in our community?
To answer this question, we invited residents from all roles and walks of life to join us for a series of community listening meetings. We met in church basements and community rec centers to share stories and meals, and spent months asking questions, connecting dots, and naming patterns that everyone felt but few had language for. What emerged was a community-built systems map that revealed that the trauma and hardships people experience are not due to their own poor choices – they are due to systems, policies, and practices that often punish and isolate people when they experience stress and challenges. This collective realization shifted how we all saw our own personal stories, and created a new sense of hope that the challenges our communities face don’t have to persist forever. If we can change how our systems respond to people who are struggling, we can change the overall health of our community.
The Three-Part Framework: From Awareness to Power
Through that mapping process, we identified three leverage points for interrupting cycles of trauma and building resilience. This became the strategy behind all of ROI’s work:
1. Building Awareness to help people in all parts of the community understand what trauma is, how it impacts our bodies and nervous systems, how it can change our behavior, and how we can help ourselves and others heal.
2. Shifting from Punitive to Restorative – With awareness, we see the world through a different lens. What used to look like defiance and poor decision-making now appears as a natural response to trauma and lack of safety. This allows us to recognize opportunities to shift our responses from punitive and isolating, to supportive and healing. These shifts provide opportunities at every level to interrupt vicious cycles of trauma over generations—in classrooms, courtrooms, social services, workplaces, and even in the relationship between funders and grantees.
3. Developing New Leaders – In a community that has an abundance of support and opportunities for healing, those who have healed can eventually be in positions to lead, to heal others, to make policy decisions, and to actually orchestrate and structure systems rather than being on the outside looking in. This is the end goal that we as a community are striving for. This is our North Star.
What Is Trauma & Resilience 101?
That first leverage point, building awareness, led to our first program: Trauma & Resilience 101 (T&R 101, for short).
T&R 101 is a community-led and science-backed training that unpacks how trauma shows up in our bodies, our behaviors, and our systems, and how we can begin to heal from its impacts. It is facilitated by certified trainers with lived experience—grassroots leaders who were part of ROI’s original listening and mapping process and have done their own healing work to now guide others through theirs. Some of them have been incarcerated, several are veterans, many are faith leaders, most are parents and caregivers, and all of them are living examples of our innate capacity to heal and persist. The training helps participants understand their own trauma responses, recognize harmful patterns in their personal relationships and work settings, and begin shifting toward restorative practices for themselves and with others.
Since offering our first training in 2018, our bench of rural community leaders have trained over 15,000 people across rural North Carolina counties, representing roles as broad as teachers, police officers, juvenile court counselors, nurses, corporate employers, and many more.
What makes T&R 101 powerful is the revelation it unlocks: We all carry trauma. Educators carry it. Law enforcement carries it. Social workers carry it. And funders carry it too. And that means that we all also hold an opportunity to start the healing process for ourselves and to create space for others to heal.
When Funders Did the Work Alongside Us
Many of our funders have been part of ROI’s work since the beginning. And not just as early believers who wrote the checks that allowed us to get started. They joined us as participants in our work, travelling to our community meetings, engaging in the systems mapping process, and attending our earliest T&R 101 trainings.
They sat alongside residents and community leaders and even their own grantees and unpacked their own trauma—how it lives in their bodies, how it shows up in their decision-making, how it has shaped their organizations’ policies. And in doing so, they discovered that the dynamics in the systems map—the scarcity, the fear of failure and punishment, the repeated trauma of being too overwhelmed to help everyone who needs it—infiltrate the funding world just as much as they impact our most struggling communities. The struggles actually unite us more than they divide us.
What happened next was transformative. Several of our funders commissioned T&R 101 training for their entire staffs – inviting our rural community leaders to educate them and reversing the power dynamics that often govern funder-grantee relationships. They began examining their own grant processes through a trauma-informed lens. They asked themselves: Where are we unintentionally retraumatizing the communities we strive to serve? Where are we operating from fear and scarcity instead of trust and abundance?
The result wasn’t just healthier funder-grantee relationships, it was a fundamentally different paradigm that most of our community members had never experienced before. A paradigm where funders come to the table as participants in the community ecosystem, not as external observers or saviors.
What Funders Can Do: Practices That Embody the Leverage
Since our first T&R 101 training in 2018, we have seen several positive shifts from funders that have been able to apply the trauma-informed learnings from our training towards the ways that they interact with grantees. Here are a few of our top takeaways.
1. Educate Yourself, Your Staff, Your Board
Invest in trauma and resilience training for your entire team—not just your program officers, but your finance staff, your board members, and your administrative team. Examine how trauma impacts your own bodies, responses, policies, and practices. Ask yourselves: Where are our processes retraumatizing the communities we aim to serve? Where are we operating from fear instead of trust? How can we better support our employees’ health and wellbeing so they can best show up for their grantees? And continue to offer team spaces to revisit these topics annually or more as an ongoing commitment to your healing and awareness.
2. Shift to Restorative Funding Practices
Examine every touchpoint in your grantmaking process and ask: How can we make this as simple as possible so that grantees can focus on doing their work?
Here’s what restorative funding can look like:
- Offer grant writing support to nonprofits: reduce the labor of translating their work into your language, so that they can focus on what they do best which is their programs
- Provide multiple modes of applying: offer a choice between written, recorded audio/video, or phone call to answer the application questions
- Go to people instead of making them come to you: send staff to experience organizations firsthand, then offer to draft the application for them and let them review and edit. View your role as unearthing the best work, not making them discover you.
- Provide general operating support and multi-year funding that gives organizations breathing room and flexibility to adapt to changing community needs. And if funding will not be renewed, give at least one years’ notice so that organizations can adapt and plan for the shift.
- Simplify reporting requirements: Take the onus off grantees to perform their trauma story and instead participate in their programs, capture stories of impact, and make data requirements as simple as possible.
The goal is to structure funding in ways that honor grantees’ time, capacity, and humanity, strengthening not only their ability to lead the work but also the resilience of the entire ecosystem—even for those you may never fund.
3. Put People with Lived Experience in Decision-Making Seats
This is the full loop—the third leverage point in action. Community voices that shaped the insights in the systems map now need to reshape the systems that fund and govern the work.
What this looks like:
- Hire from the communities where you fund, especially in roles with decision-making power.
- Create internal professional development supports that allow employees with lived experience to grow into leadership roles in your organization.
- Have staff who show up and participate in your grantees’ programs, volunteer alongside them, and build relationships rooted in mutuality.
- Explore community representation on your boards—not just advisory roles, but seats with actual voting power.
- Create grantee advisory councils that influence funding priorities and policies.
- Fairly compensate community members and grantees for their time, expertise, and leadership.
The key shift is about funders seeing themselves as part of the community ecosystem, subject to the same cycles of trauma and resilience, responsible for doing their own work alongside the communities they invest in.
What started with a handful of funders taking the time to listen and learn from community members in spaces like T&R 101, has grown to what now seems like a larger shift in philanthropy across the country. We are seeing more and more funders examining their policies and practices and making changes that support people closest to the problem to teach, train, and lead.
That’s how trauma-informed practice grows from a single meeting in a small town in rural Eastern North Carolina, to a transformed system that can shift the future for all rural communities.
If you’re ready to begin this journey, we invite you to experience Trauma & Resilience 101. Learn more and request a training here: https://www.ruralopportunity.org/trauma-resilience-101/
The truth is, we all carry trauma. And we all have the innate capacity to heal. When we are able to acknowledge that and practice healing approaches together, we can collectively shift towards new ways of being that make us, our teams, the nonprofit ecosystem, and the communities we serve more effective and resilient.
If this resonated with you, continue the conversation with us in person at Guardian Summit! At Camelback’s annual convening of visionaries and community builders, we’ll honor the progress that has been made, share stories of transformation, and collaborate across the ecosystem to build the blueprint for the future of innovation.
