The Healing Racial Trauma Initiative
“Healing is about taking the time to notice what gets in the way of feeling connected to your life, your community, and your sense of possibility. Healing, at its core, is about slowing down so that we can better listen to ourselves and each other."
Susan Raffo
Welcome to the Healing Racial Trauma Initiative
The Healing Racial Trauma Initiative (HRTI) is a program rooted in community, research, and justice. Here, we seek to shine a light on the conditions and methods necessary to transform the pain and trauma stemming from both direct and indirect manifestations of violence within the prevailing structures of white supremacy and capitalism.
Designed for and by People of Color (POC) in Maine with funding from the Maine Health Access Foundation, Mindbridge’s Healing Racial Trauma Initiative (HRTI) was established through community listening, research, and analysis. Since 2021, HRTI developed the “Maine Racial Equity Social Determinants of Health”; developed, conducted, and analyzed the first “Maine Racial Trauma Survey”; and conducted a series of Community Conversations that identified and analyzed community structures and comprehensive qualitative data to inform therapeutic intervention and community healing. Results of these efforts are highlighted in the comprehensive HRTI 2023 report available below.
Watch our introductory video
What does healing look like at HRTI?
HRTI views healing as an ongoing process of exploration where clients and practitioners can safely unpack pain and trauma accumulated throughout their lifetimes. Here, we explore the cause and effect relationship between breathing in racial harm & the constriction of life force. We value the questions that arise as much as the answers that come through.
At HRTI, healing is a place where we can be witnessed in our pain and loved through it, a place where we are reminded what safety and belonging feels like. Here, healing is not an event or destination to be arrived at, it is a daily practice of listening, affirming, soothing and rest that takes us from moment to moment and is with us to endure through our toughest moments.
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The Healing Racial Trauma Report
Please click above to access the 2023 HRTI Report
RESOURCES
In addition to the therapeutic programming that we look forward to launching in the Fall of 2024, HRTI has built a comprehensive collection of resources that may aid in the journey of healing and belonging. Please click on the link below to access our free resource library
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“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. “
James Baldwin