SECTOR: Post-secondary education
EMPLOYEES:
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- 205 – Full-Time Faculty
- 368 – Adjunct Faculty
- 313 – Staff
THE CHALLENGE
About Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) is a public community college committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive learning environment. It serves students seeking to enrich their lives, advance their careers, earn associate degrees, or transfer to four-year institutions.
Amid heightened national attention to racism and privilege, alongside the ongoing pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, SBCC sought to strengthen its commitment to equity, cultural responsiveness, and inclusion. The challenges of supporting a multiracial, multicultural administration, faculty, staff, and student body underscored the need for a systemic approach to transforming workplace culture. SBCC partnered with Lumos Transforms to build the knowledge and skills necessary for cultivating a truly inclusive, equitable organizational and learning environment.
THE APPROACH
Comprehensive eTIRO Capacity Building
SBCC worked with Lumos Transforms to implement a five-part, 12-hour embodied trauma-informed resilience-oriented (eTIRO) capacity-building training program. Delivered over two semesters during the 2022-2023 academic year, the program aimed to equip participants with the tools to embody anti-oppressive values and practices while fostering organizational transformation. The core eTIRO principles are safety; trust and transparency; collaboration and mutuality; peer support; voice, choice, and self-agency; and cultural humility.
The training was grounded in the Resilience Toolkit, a somatic framework for first-stage trauma healing and real-time stress navigation. This framework guides participants through a progressive journey—from awareness to discernment to coherence to transformation—that helps people and communities stabilize, reconnect, and grow their capacity for healing and transformation. By integrating the neuroscience of trauma with practical tools for somatic awareness and self-regulation, individuals are better equipped to create the safety and trust needed for collaborative and culturally humble learning.
Lumos facilitated the program in person and virtually across 20 cohorts, engaging 335 participants. Cohorts were designed to provide psychologically safe learning environments, allowing participants to share experiences and voice concerns authentically. Participants could join groups open to all campus members or select identity-based or role-based cohorts, such as:
- Identity-based groups: Black/African/Indigenous/People of Color, Latinx, LGBTQIA+, and Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander;
- Role-based groups: Full-Time Faculty, Adjunct Faculty, Staff, and Managers/Administrators.
Throughout the five capacity-building sessions, participants explored critical topics including:
- the stress-trauma continuum and its expression on somatic, emotional, mental, behavioral, and relational levels;
- privilege, disadvantage, and intersectionality;
navigating biased attitudes, discriminatory behavior, and oppressive systems; - appeasement and internalized oppression; normative professionalism and supremacy culture; and
- the eTIRO organizational change process and application.
Lumos’ eTIRO approach to culture change is an organic process that requires openness to the unknown, responsiveness to the moment, humility to learn from mistakes, and connection to the belief that, together, we are capable of something new. The Toolkit’s methodology is justice-rooted. It recognizes stress and trauma responses as adaptive reactions to oppressive conditions and builds individual stability as a foundation for collective care and transformation. It activates the body’s natural reflex to complete the stress and trauma cycle, paired with evidence-informed mindfulness and movement practices to make it immediately effective, culturally adaptive, multi-layered, and able to address both acute stress and long-term stabilization. The training employed a range of experiential methods, including small-group activities, individual reflection, mindfulness practices, writing, and ethical storytelling that provided participants with frameworks for sharing and processing experiences in ways that honored both individual narratives and collective transformation. By embedding eTIRO principles into both curriculum design and training activities, Lumos modeled anti-oppression and guided participants through deeply rooted, experiential learning.
After each session, rapid response evaluations tracked participant learning progress and course satisfaction, supporting iterative curricula adaptation and revision. More than 80% of participants expressed satisfaction with the training across all sessions, consistently rating the facilitators’ clarity and delivery style positively. Participants particularly valued the breakout sessions and small group discussions, the interactive and collaborative elements, and the safe and inclusive environment created for learning.
The program objectives centered on developing embodied resilience through identifying personal stress-relaxation physiology in real time. Participants learned to appraise the adaptive usefulness of their personal stress response types and their intensity as related to incidents of racism or identity-based oppression and in the course of anti-oppression activities. They also learned to choose and implement appropriate strategies that worked for them individually to regulate persistent, disproportionate, and/or incongruous stress system activation. Finally, participants learned to identify, track, and attune to stress-relaxation responses in others for improved co-regulation and empathy.
THE RESULTS
Increased Resilience: Knowledge, Skills, and Attitude & Behavior Changes
The eTIRO training produced significant increases in SBCC staff’s capacity to transform organizational culture through an equity and justice lens. Participants reported growth in their ability to:
- Recognize stress and trauma responses in cross-cultural interactions;
- Identify emotional and physical states during difficult conversations and regulate their stress responses;
- Navigate cognitive barriers related to privilege and oppression;
- Empathize with individuals holding conflicting views.
Participants also gained a deeper understanding of how trauma impacts individuals and groups mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. This increased awareness fostered greater empathy and collaboration, reduced workplace stress, and improved morale across the institution.
The program created a space for authentic dialogue and connection. Participants expressed particular appreciation for learning about empathy, power, and privilege; practical tools and techniques for stress management; storytelling and embodied resilience tools; and understanding power and privilege dynamics. By acquiring these skills, SBCC staff are better positioned to integrate equity and anti-oppression practices into their work, ensuring a lasting institutional impact.
Lumos Transforms’ initial eTIRO capacity-building training places a strong emphasis on participant knowledge gain, and evaluation findings revealed substantial knowledge gains across multiple areas:
- Understanding the stress and relaxation cycle: 88% increase
- Comprehension of individual and collective aspects of trauma: 81% increase
- Mental, emotional, physical, and social impacts of trauma: 65-75% increase
- Social identity intersections: 65-75% increase
- Bias and discriminatory behaviors: 65-75% increase
- Systems of oppression: 65-75% increase
- Manifestations of supremacy culture: 65-75% increase
- Recognizing stress and trauma responses during cross-cultural interactions: 77% increase
- Identifying emotional and physical states in difficult conversations: 76% increase
- Regulating stress responses: 75% increase
- Identifying privilege and bias: 63% increase
- Considering historical disadvantage and oppression when communicating with other cultures: 62% increase
- Empathizing with individuals holding conflicting views: 48% increase
Representative participant reflections illustrate the depth of learning:
“(Learning) that our stories live in our bodies. Practicing embodied resilience tools to help us feel safe in our bodies and telling our stories in a safe place can help us feel safe in our bodies.”
“Learning about appeasement and thinking about it in terms of different roles at our institution.”
“What I found valuable is to finally come to the realization that I also have privileges. While for the longest time, I thought of these privileges as survival mechanisms, I now see that they are in fact privileges. Knowing this will allow me to use my voice for those who are vulnerable and don’t find their voice within them.”
CONCLUSION
SBCC’s partnership with Lumos exemplifies the transformative potential of trauma-informed, equity-focused organizational change. Through the eTIRO program, SBCC staff gained the tools to navigate the complexities of building an equitable and inclusive culture while fostering resilience, collaboration, and empathy.
This initiative serves as a model for other institutions seeking to integrate anti-oppressive practices into their organizational structures. By aligning individual growth with systemic change, SBCC is cultivating a workplace culture that maximizes its institutional impact and empowers its diverse community to thrive. Moving forward, SBCC can build on this foundation by prioritizing safe and inclusive spaces for dialogue; improving communication techniques, especially among those in leadership positions; proactively addressing power dynamics; and providing continuous opportunities for staff development.
