SECTOR: Arts and Social Justice
EMPLOYEES: 40 Member Organizations
INTRODUCTION
The Arts for Healing Justice Network (AHJN) envisions a future where youth are empowered and systems are transformed using the arts as a catalyst for change. As California’s only arts collaborative serving incarcerated youth, AHJN unites diverse community-based organizations to deliver high-quality arts programming—including creative writing, spoken word, visual arts, theater, digital media, dance, and music—to youth in Los Angeles County detention facilities. This programming builds resilience and wellness, reduces recidivism, and advocates for juvenile justice reform. AHJN uses arts education as a core strategy to address trauma, redirect lives, and support successful reentry, while providing trauma-informed training for institutional staff to promote systems change. The network fosters collaboration among artists, youth, policymakers, funders, nonprofits, and researchers, leveraging the transformative power of the arts for justice and reform.
THE CHALLENGE
AHJN approached Lumos Transforms to support its staff and teaching artists working in probation camps—high-trauma environments where many staff also have lived experience within these systems. AHJN sought training to build resilience skills to mitigate the secondary and vicarious trauma experienced when working with incarcerated youth, particularly tools that would support professional quality of life, staff mental health, and their ability to effectively serve detained youth.
THE APPROACH
Building Embodied Resilience to Address Trauma
Given the prevalence of trauma-related stress in criminal justice settings, Lumos recommended its Embodied Resilience for Workplace Wellness course. Delivered in early 2023, this training centered on working with the nervous system and the whole bodymind in real time, meeting participants where stress lives: in their bodies, their relationships, and their work. It equipped AHJN member organization staff and teaching artists with tools to enhance self-awareness, emotional regulation, and empathic connections in the service of fostering healthier relationships and workplace environments. Using the Resilience Toolkit framework, participants developed embodied self-awareness and practiced accessible tools to manage stress responses in real time. They learned to choose and implement appropriate strategies to regulate persistent, inappropriate, or distressing stress system activation. The training also explored how body awareness supports the capacity to set supportive boundaries and maintain empathic connection—skills essential when working with high-trauma populations like youth in detention. In addition, the training explored vicarious trauma and burnout, emphasizing professional quality of life. Participants examined the qualities of effective self-care, learning to differentiate between self-care that truly builds resilience and actions that may provide temporary relief without addressing underlying stress. They also identified barriers and supports to sustaining a regular practice of the Toolkit over time. Two peer practice sessions reinforced these skills, fostering trust, collaboration, and healing through shared experiences and mutual support.
The positive response to the training led AHJN to request additional capacity-building sessions. Lumos offered the Foundations of the Embodied Trauma-Informed Resilience-Oriented (eTIRO) Approach, which is centered on the core principles of safety, trust, collaboration, voice, cultural humility, and peer support. Participants examined the impact of interpersonal, historical, and collective trauma on individuals and groups, exploring how trauma manifests physically, emotionally, mentally, and relationally. They explored how stress responses emerge from social hierarchies and systems of oppression, deepening their understanding of how hierarchy and power imbalances shape the stress-trauma continuum. They also learned actionable strategies for implementing eTIRO principles in organizational change efforts, fostering a culture of equity, compassion, and justice.
Participants examined the often-invisible dynamics of appeasement—relational behaviors designed to pacify interpersonal threats— and learned that appeasement is particularly corrosive in hierarchical contexts like the criminal justice system, where power imbalances are constant and chronic. Because appeasement is both a biological stress response and a social phenomenon rooted in systems of oppression, it cannot be regulated away through individual practices alone—it requires systems change. Participants explored how to notice when appeasement is occurring, regulate their own responses, and create space for systems change work, while recognizing these patterns as adaptive reactions to inequitable systems rather than individual failures.
THE RESULTS
Increased Resilience and Confidence
After the first course, participants reported increased confidence in identifying and managing stress and trauma responses. They valued the opportunity to connect with and listen to their bodies’ responses and develop embodied awareness that supports both self-regulation and empathic attunement with the youth they serve. They also enjoyed the autonomy to select tools and practices that helped them regulate their nervous system and worked for each participant based on their individual embodied awareness. One participant shared, “Classes like this are essential and should be available to everybody.”
Following the second course, participants gained deeper insights into how embodiment supports boundary-setting, empathy, and addressing vicarious trauma. They also recognized the connection between self-care and their ability to effectively care for others. Participants explored the far-reaching effects of interpersonal, historic, and collective trauma and how to implement the eTIRO framework to create trauma-informed organizations. Peer breakout sessions fostered connection and collective problem-solving, with one participant reflecting, “The more we talk about real things that have happened, the more we don’t feel alone, and the more we can discuss how to move forward.”
A significant number of participants expressed a desire for continued training, recognizing the importance of sustained practice and ongoing support for deepening these skills over time. As one participant noted, “consistently practicing these tools in a safe place is crucial. This should be offered at least a couple of times a year.”
