Tarboro is a proud community. It is a place where people help one another and where people come together during times of crisis. Like the leaders of this place from earlier times, local leaders continue to bring openness and vision for trying new approaches to solving sticky, long-standing, challenging problems.

In collaboration with the local public school district, ROI spent three months hosting listening interviews with parents and providers in East Tarboro. The clear, resounding theme of these interviews was people identifying different micro and macro stressors and traumas, as well as a lack of easily accessible support. 

Once this issue was identified at the grassroots level, ROI conducted 91 interviews and 11 focus groups with parents, school staff and administration, healthcare and public health workers, law enforcement, as well as justice, faith, business and elected officials. These interviews and focus groups led to a community-wide commitment to work together on one of the most pressing issues facing the community: unaddressed trauma. 

ROI believes that individuals should not be blamed for the trauma that impacts them, rather people must hold systems accountable for the inequities they produce and recreate. Edgecombe County is only 153 years post slavery and only 48 years post segregation. The community persevered through the Great Depression and three recessions. And most recently, the community survived two major floods where many families were left without homes and some individuals lost their lives. 

Because of the complexity and ever-changing nature of a challenge like collective trauma, ROI took a systems mapping approach, seeking out facilitative support that mirrored the values of leading with assets, working with what’s working, and building together. ROI believes that this approach could provide a more subtle, specific process that engages community members to build with and not for, an approach that allows more thoughtful, nuanced and holistic strategies that shift systems away from punishment and towards healing and repair.

With these loops and patterns mapped out, Engaging Inquiry facilitated a Leverage Workshop, a day-long event held at the local library that included community members and a cross-section of leaders of local systems and agencies. The map provides comprehensive visual representation of the work that community members, ROI and Engaging Inquiry had put into building an understanding of the system. But the process of creating this map was arguably more powerful as an input. In doing so, community members across all sides of the issue were influential in articulating and aligning around actions they would take together towards lasting, sustainable change. The systems map showed people the underlying feedback loops and patterns, and shifted people’s thinking from event-based (B happens because A happened), to loop/pattern based (A leads to B, which leads to C, which leads back to A).

A local hospital administrator said, “Being part of this systems mapping process, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen the result of the input I’ve shared. When I look at the map, I see my family’s story in it. I see my granddaughter’s story in it. The map represents what is happening to people in our community, and shows how people are not to blame for the trauma that impacts them. The map focuses us on shared opportunities to support more healing.” 

In order to synthesize nine months of community engagement work and pull together the findings from the Leverage Workshop, Engaging Inquiry supported ROI to develop a systemic strategy for healing that ensured the voices of the 300+ community members involved in these processes were well represented. The final strategy focuses on increasing knowledge and awareness on how stress impacts the brain, shifting to healing and restorative responses to trauma as opposed to punitive responses, and connecting people to leadership opportunities where people with experience in healing are able to lead others. 

For more on the impact the Leverage Workshop had on Tarboro community members, watch this video produced by EducationNC.

To promote a shift to healing and restorative responses to trauma, as opposed to punitive responses, a biofeedback breathing pilot was initiated at a local middle school. Students who were frequently removed from the classroom for behavioral disruptions saw a 57% decrease in anxiety symptoms. This measurable decrease in anxiety symptoms helped students in a variety of ways, as they described in their own words. 

The success in the school pilot program inspired the Edgecombe County Detention Center to become one of the first county jails in the country to use biofeedback breathing for people currently detained in jail. They also created an open-source Biofeedback Breathing Program Implementation Guide, designed to be used by any public agency or non-profit who wants to implement a program similar to ROI’s past pilots.

ROI has a community-board that oversees all awareness-building and training activities related to the strategy articulated from the Leverage map. This board is made up of community members from diverse backgrounds and experiences, with particular attention to those most impacted by trauma and those working to build resilience in community. This group meets monthly to inform the work from residents’ perspective and hold the organization accountable for building a more trauma-informed, resilience-focused rural Eastern NC.

In addition to the community benefits, ROI has seen a 10x increase in capital into their local community effort through new funding from across the state of North Carolina. They started a 3-year partnership with UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, creating formative and summative evaluation plans, producing a podcast that interviews local police officers about their experiences with trauma and healing and building a community-wide data dashboard to track publically available data indicators longitudinally to see community-level progress and researched national best practices for restorative justice practices in public systems.