Neighborhood Resilience Project

Neighborhood Resilience Project Overview

Years ago, a woman entered a professional development program hosted by the organization at the time. She excelled in the program. She went on to get a job right away. A month later, she came in saying she left the first job but got a second one. A month after that, she said she left the second job, but got a third one. This cycle went on for upwards of two years. Our CEO, Fr. Paul Abernathy sat her down and asked her what was going on and why she was job hopping so often. She expressed to Father Paul - “When I was 15 years old, I was in foster care. One day, alone with the other foster children, the other males in foster care held me down and raped me. Every time I lost a job, it was because I was working with men”. Father Paul realized she could not sustain opportunity until she healed from the trauma. This woman’s story was so familiar to people who are living in and from under-served communities all across the nation. 

Fr. Paul is an Iraq war veteran and while he was overseas, he learned about PTSD. However, when he came home, he quickly learned that our brothers and sisters in under-served communities, have lived with a lifetime of trauma and that for them the trauma was not post, but current and every day. 

Thus, putting these stories together and knowing what he did about the trauma facing our communities, Fr. Paul started to lead the charge of problematizing community trauma so a solution could be found.

In 2012, members from the Orthodox Christian community began to engage the Hill District in a wider conversation about Community Trauma. This engagement was in partnership with Duquesne University and culminated in a Consultative Workshop in 2014. As a result of these conversations, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh began to work in partnership to develop a technically advanced method to evaluate the health and wellbeing and resilience in the community. These partnerships resulted in a confluence of strategies that have become the basis for Trauma Informed Community Development (TICD). As informed by the lived experience of trauma, both personal and collective, TICD is a framework that establishes and promotes resilient healing and healthy communities so that people can be healthy enough to sustain opportunities and realize their potential.

Rooted in the Gospel and teachings of the Orthodox Church, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement (American 1950s-1960s), the mission of the Neighborhood Resilience Project is to support the transformation of neighborhoods from Trauma Affected Communities to Resilient Healing and Healthy Communities through Trauma Informed Community Development. The vision of the organization is to inspire a movement in which suffering people are raised up from the ashes of trauma in unconditional love to become empowered healers, community builders, and positive change makers.

Neighborhood Resilience Project has very effectively created a process wherein community members with lived experience of trauma, academicians, and researchers have been able to come together to develop solutions to community trauma. Having developed our own health assessment tool to measure the impact of this, we have demonstrated the ability to improve health and wellbeing and reduce utilization of social services. Community members established the table, academics and researchers joined the table, which has enabled a new way to redefine, reestablish and renew the ability for trauma affected communities to become a healthy, healing, and resilient community.

The Neighborhood Resilience Project has a record of serving an average of 2,230 persons each month with 50 staff members and 500+ volunteers. The people served includes:

• 1,500+ children provided 8 food items each weekend 

• $4,000 provided to the community in emergency relief each month

• Participants in one of 13 therapeutic groups hosted by the organization each week.

• Participants who are supported through therapeutic interactions with trained staff (216 of which were completed in the past year).

• The people that are supported with Psychological First Aid and Mental Health First Aid through the Trauma Response Team deploying to 100% of gun homicide events. 

• Our Community Health Deputies offer 8-12 wellness clinics each month to provide vaccines and health checks to people in medically under-served communities to help reduce the death gap.

• Participants helped through the roll out of our Trauma Informed Community Development Framework both on street blocks and in the housing projects.

• 600+ patients of the Free Health Center who receive all medical care for free.

• Training and support to advance Trauma Informed Community Development in multiple communities across the nation.