My Final Project as a Fellow with the Community Change Team: Together23
My name is Devon Player ‘23 and I am a senior Sociology major and Race and Ethnic Studies minor. Over the past academic year, I have had the incredible opportunity to work with the 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).
Now, at the tail end of my fellowship, it is hard to come up with words that can express the immense amount of gratitude I feel toward this amazing coalition. I think one of the most valuable things I received from this opportunity was the amount of trust and empowerment the entire team instilled in me. When I initially pitched the idea I had for the coalition’s first public event, it was something I had come up with based on the philosophy that the Career and Community Engagement Center teaches as a method of engaging ethically and effectively with your community and was something I never expected to blossom into what it did. It was such an exciting feeling for the rest of the team to listen to my idea and then build upon that with all of the resources, expertise, and connections they have in the community to make it a reality. The overarching goal of the event was to create a space for storytelling, compassion, education, and relationship building, centered around the connection between addiction and trauma. We wanted to create a space where members of our community could share their lived experiences with substance use disorders, and where our community could develop a more holistic and trauma-informed understanding of the diversity of experience and individual need when it comes to addiction and recovery. It was also important to us that we create a space for open dialogue about how we as a community can better support each other, and in a more general sense, begin to destigmatize addiction.
After many zoom calls with the team, many conversations with my wonderful supervisors Karen Carmen and Abby Juhasz, and many meetings with folks in different departments at Whitman who generously volunteered their time and resources to contribute to this event, we were able to collectively put together a space for education, storytelling, and reflection. While I was not as involved in the process of reaching out to specific artists in our community outside of students at Whitman (as we were intentional about having the people on our team with the most personal connection to artists be the ones to talk to them about if/how they would like to share their story), many people on our team took a lot of time to conduct one of if not the most important part of the planning process and that was community outreach. These conversations with individuals/groups/orgs in our community were essential, because we wanted to make sure anyone who wanted to share their story felt comfortable doing so at this event and more importantly, felt comfortable asking for what the needed from us to make it as safe and empowering of an experience for them as possible. While we gave small gifts to everyone who participated in the event as an artist or panelist, for many participants, the platform to share their story and engage in this kind of dialogue in a shared space with the broader community was all the would have wanted or asked for in return for their vulnerability, perspectives, and expertise. I was genuinely in awe of the range and beauty of artwork that was shared at this event; as audience members we heard incredibly impactful spoken word poetry and music, and we engaged with stunning pieces of visual art ranging from paintings on canvas and on skateboards, to intricately detailed pottery, to carefully, and beautifully grown bonsai trees, and much more! I remember just a few months ago sharing concerns with the rest of the team that we might not have enough submissions or audience members to fill the space and am beyond proud of how this project grew since then. Reid ballroom with packed with art and eager audience members from all over the Walla Walla Valley ready to engage with the beautiful stories shared at Together23. I think the thing that brought me the most joy after that night was the overwhelming enthusiasm I heard from artists, attendees, counselors, non-profit leaders, educators, and students about the event and their many inquiries about future events like this one. As a team, we have already begun compiling data, feedback, and resources that emerged from this first event and have started planning for many more designed for specific audiences in our community and different spaces.
In closing, I just want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who made Together23 possible and to the Community Change Team for the opportunity to help organize this event – I have grown and learned so much because of you all and will carry that with me forever!
I’ll continue to be a part of this coalition for the foreseeable future, so if you, or someone you know is interested in learning more about the Community Change Team, joining the team, or participating in a future event, please feel free to reach out to me or go to www.communitychangeteam.org. There you can also find more information about and photos from Together23.
Recovery from addiction is possible. For help, please call the free and confidential treatment referral hotline (1-800-662-HELP), or visit findtreatment.gov.
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.