Healing-Centered Engagement is a framework developed by Dr. Shawn Ginwright, founder of Flourish Agenda. Flourish Agenda defines this approach as “a process that transforms individual practices, advances healthy interpersonal connections and improves institutional culture, to create healthy outcomes for youth and the adults who serve them.”
This approach to engagement is comprised of five C-A-R-M-A principles: Culture and Identity, Agency, Relationships, Meaning, and Aspiration. Generation Hope transplants the principles of healing-centered engagement into oral history and storytelling practice with LGBTQ+ elders.
Our goal is to empower LGBTQ+ elders to share their life stories and pass along their wisdom for LGBTQ+ youth to connect with, draw inspiration from, and find belonging in through representation.
Interviewing
Generation Hope implements the healing-centered engagement approach to interview questions and interviewing by focusing on shared community and identity; how LGBTQ+ community resilience and resistance has shaped who we are; the strengths and challenges of elderhood; connection, relationships, and belonging; and how meaning can be found in later life.
Storytelling
LGBTQ+ people are more than our history of oppression. We contain multitudes.
Our healing-centered engagement approach to storytelling centers on self-determination, the life long journey of activism and resistance in the LGBTQ+ community, belonging, elderhood, and love.
In the words of Rev. Jesse Jackson, Generation Hope provides an opportunity for LGBTQ+ elders to say, “I am old. I am somebody.”
Jewish Federations of America: Center on Aging, Trauma, and Holocaust Survivor Care defines the person-centered, trauma-informed (PCTI) approach as “a holistic model of care that promotes the health and well-being of individuals by accounting for the role of trauma across the life course and by resisting re-traumatization, while also focusing on the strength, agency, and dignity of the person receiving care.”
The principles of the PCTI care approach are personalization; respect; coordination; self-determination; empowerment, voice, and choice; transparency and trust; cultural, historical, and gender consideration; safety; peer-support; and collaboration and mutuality.
Interviewing
Narrators are in the drivers seat of their interview. Each interview is uniquely aligned with the narrator.
We are all impacted by trauma. Discussing the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ elders requires an intentional approach that honors the whole person and resists re-traumatization.
The PCTI approach informs both our interview questions and interview approach.
Storytelling
We are each complex individuals with rich histories, hopes, dreams, and values.
Portraying the stories of LGBTQ+ elders in a manner that encompasses the whole person is vital to ensuring this work is done with care.
Narrators are an active part of the storytelling process. The PCTI approach informs the pre- and post-production process to ensure stories are presented in an ethical and compassionate way.