My name is Devon Player ‘23 and I am a Sociology major and Race and Ethnic Studies minor. Since last Spring, I have been working in different capacities with the Walla Walla Community Change Team: Trauma-Informed Addiction Recovery and Prevention. The overarching goal of this team is to inspire positive community change and honor personal dignity through compassionate communication and education about the connection between addiction and trauma. This has been an incredible experience and Whitman’s Community Fellow Program has allowed me to really expand my role with their team. The Community Change Team is a coalition of several different organizations in the Walla Walla Valley (including Community Resilience Initiative, Hope Street Homes, Walla Walla Public Schools, Blue Mountain Heart to Heart, and Population Health). I think one of the coolest things about this opportunity has been the ability to be a part of a community centered team in its initial stages of development. I’ve had the opportunity to sit in on several meetings where we are working as a team to develop our shared values, goals, and strategic plan as the coalition moves forward. Right now, the team is focused on stigma reduction in relation to substance use disorders and recovery.
The main project that I am working on right now is creating the Community Change Team’s first large public event! We want to create a safe and compassionate space for community building, listening, conversing, learning, and reflecting around substance use disorders and addiction in our community. We want that space to be both empowering for those who choose to share their stories (whether that be through speech, visual art, music, or performance), and educational for those who come to participate. There is a common misconception that addiction is a choice; that folks who have a substance use disorder just aren’t trying hard enough and this is the broader message the team is trying to dismantle. While the beginning of this community event will start with an educational panel, discussing the goals of this group, the science behind substance use disorders and recovery, its connection to trauma and epigenetics, and the importance of community support systems, the most central part of this event will be storytelling.
We want to create an intentional space for folks who have lived experience with substance use disorders (whether that is a direct or indirect connection), to share their stories in the way that is most comfortable and most meaningful to them. This portion of the event will be multimedia and we are inviting anyone from the Walla Walla community to share their stories, art, music, comedy, dance, or anything other form of expression they like with us at this event. We want to honor the vulnerability, knowledge, and lived experiences of the storytellers and so this portion of the event is just meant for everyone else in attendance to listen and absorb. The conversation that comes up a lot in our meetings centers around the fact that the societal stigma that exists around substance use disorders and recovery prevents us from hearing and seeing the experiences that actually stand in opposition to those stigmas. The event will end with a space for reflection and connection to hopefully start generating a sense of community responsibility when it comes to addressing substance use disorders in our community. The reality is that as humans, we must rely on one another for support, compassion, and love, and until we begin to see substance use disorders as a social issue rather than an individual problem, we will be failing to meet the needs of our community as a whole.
I previously wrote a post about collective liberation – something I learned from my time interning at Freedom Project, WA. And I hope this event with the Community Change Team will generate energy around this idea of collective liberation; seeing how we are all implicated in these support systems and even if we do not personally have experience with a substance use disorder, we all have a role to play in our collective response to the mental and physical health issues in our community.
If you are interested in passing along something to be shown, or participating through performance, speech, or reading at the storytelling portion of our event, please reach out to communityprojects@whitman.edu.
Experiences like Devon’s are made possible by the Whitman Community Fellow Program, which allows organizations of the Walla Walla Valley region to apply for the opportunity to create an unpaid, part-time fellowship addressing some of the area’s social, economic and cultural challenges. To learn how you could become involved, contact us at ccec_info@whitman.edu.