Sarasota housing nonprofits helped by a new trauma-informed training program

Rebecca Gannon looked into the blank stares of the homeless women she was trying to help.

Even as the women sat quietly with fidgeting infants, Gannon sensed they couldn’t hear her, their emotions roiling inside.

“It almost seems like they can’t understand the situation that I’m sharing,” Gannon said.

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Gannon, 37, understands their plight well because she was there, too, more than a decade ago – her past trauma compounded by the toxic stress of living on the street.

That trauma-induced paralysis puts people in danger of falling through the cracks – of being labeled by caseworkers as “noncompliant,” or unwilling to help themselves.

“Your mind can’t gain traction on any kind of recovery,” she said. “It’s been on a hamster wheel just trying to survive.”

Now experiences like Gannon’s will be widely addressed.

Coming amid a soaring housing crisis, Gulf Coast Community Foundation this month is launching a major effort to help area nonprofits that work on homelessness provide trauma-informed care.

Through the help of an anonymous donor, the foundation is rolling out a new Trauma-Informed Homeless Services System.

The project will start with four area nonprofits that work on homelessness: Harvest House; Family Promise of South Sarasota County; Suncoast Partnership to End Homelessness; and CASL (Community Supported & Assisted Living).

“We know that housing is necessary to end homelessness,” said Jennifer Johnston, Gulf Coast’s director of community leadership.

“But sometimes it’s not sufficient,” she added. “In addition to that, beyond bread and housing, people often need social support and hope and healing to be able to overcome the systemic challenges of homelessness and unemployment.”

While permanent and safe shelter is essential for a person’s emotional and physical well-being, Johnston said, often an underlying trauma is ignored – preventing long-term stability.

“If they’re not able to address the trauma in their life, they’re not in a place to move forward. They can’t be successful,” Johnston said.

Not only can the survival mode of homelessness exacerbate old wounds, but so can untrained caseworkers at agencies where people turn for help.

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A client’s outbursts, hypervigilance, withdrawals or addictions can be written off as behavioral problems and result in a client being removed from a program.

The new program will bring in national trauma professionals to guide leaders and staff of the four nonprofits through ways to recognize and respond to client behaviors that result from trauma.

The training will include everything from overhauling internal policies and facilities in order to create zones of safety, to coaching staff on trauma-informed interactions with clients.

Importantly, the staff will become equipped with methods of steering clients to resources on mental health – plugging them into treatment before they can lose their housing.

What’s more, as nonprofits themselves experience major burnout and turnover, the training will help staff address their own past traumas, toxic stress and sense of helplessness as they try to assist legions of clients in the current housing crisis.

“How do you remain that source of calm and support in that moment?” she said. “We know that if we can help the staff person to be coming from their best self and offer their gifts, and the client is able to receive them, then we have effective services.”

As part of the initiative, leaders will be tracking results over the next year and more, potentially expanding the program to other nonprofits in the area.

Phillip “P.J.” Brooks, the chief operating officer at CASL, is excited to be part of the first cohort of four nonprofits.

Almost his entire staff – from kitchen and maintenance workers to case managers and administration – is participating. He thinks it will help the entire team work “from the same sheet of music” to provide a safe environment for residents to address long-repressed underlying traumas, from child abuse to post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“The safer they feel, the more apt the residents are going to be working on issues, which in turn helps them maintain stable housing,” Brooks said.

That’s what Gannon hopes to help with, too. She is a member of the initiative’s volunteer steering committee, along with numerous experts on trauma.

She, too, had felt re-traumatized in the past by caseworkers whom she’d sought help through the years – people whose gossip or own anger made her feel unsafe, exacerbating her difficulty with trust.

As someone who has lived through the experience, her goal on the steering committee, she said, is to be an advocate for peer support at the area’s homelessness services. It was peer support programs that helped her deal with her own past trauma.

Now Gannon, married and working as a barber in Sarasota, owns her home. She hopes to open her own shop by the end of the year.

Though sometimes her new ventures scare her to death, she says, she’s excited to meet them.

“I used to run from fear and pain and used to quit,” she said. “Today I do it in spite of the fear.”

This story comes from a partnership between the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County. Saundra Amrhein covers the Season of Sharing campaign, along with issues surrounding housing, utilities, child care and transportation in the area. She can be reached at samrhein@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota housing agencies: Trauma-informed care training coming