MU pushing ahead with massive anti-trauma effort
Organizations attempt to tackle issues together
It's no secret that Milwaukee's social agencies, nonprofits and activists historically have operated in disjointed silos without an overarching strategy, and only in recent years have started to join forces, albeit in small steps.
And so it’s no small feat that Marquette University this week filled an auditorium for the fourth time this year with organizations that otherwise don't coordinate — and then got them to agree in principle to join a collaborative new effort to address the city's epidemic of trauma.
Public health researchers argue that neurological trauma on a widespread scale is the root cause for much of the city’s unemployment, mental illness, addiction, alcoholism and even suicide and homelessness.
Led by university president Mike Lovell and his wife, Amy, a mental health activist, the latest Marquette gathering won consensus on a pithy mission statement: “To inspire a dynamic collaboration that heals trauma and creates a resilient community.”
Nearly a hundred participants — from hospitals, social agencies, community centers, universities, criminal justice and foundations — on Wednesday also signed off on a vision for what they jointly hope to accomplish: “A connected trauma-responsive community where all can thrive.”
“We need everyone’s support in this
room because the challenge is so great,” Mike Lovell told the assembly.
Now comes the hard part.
The Lovells need to transform their loose network into a team that can sync their agendas under the banner of a bigger cause and common strategy. They'll be maneuvering within a patchwork of often isolated and insulated if well-intended organizations.
It’s not instinctive to align agencies and clinics that often compete for grants from the same funders and that operate with separate mission statements of their own, according to assembly participants.
“We want to be a team, but we all wear multiple hats,” said Lynn Sheets, a child abuse pediatrician and professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “The problem we run into is tribalism,” said Sheets, who supports the Lovells' objectives. Looking across the room Wednesday, she said: “To call this a ‘team’ is a challenge.”
Given the sheer enormity of the trauma in Milwaukee — the city perennially ranks among the most impoverished big cities in the nation — the scope and scale of the problems already overwhelm the current efforts, said Jon Lehrmann, professor in psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Medical College.
That leaves no choice except to collaborate. “This is bigger than any single agency or organization by itself,” said Lehrmann during the meeting. “We can all break off a piece, but we will never be as effective as we are together.”
“We are trying to tackle something for which there aren’t enough people, so we're trying to form a 'team of teams',” said Paul Gasser, a biomedical professor at Marquette who studies brain science.
As they’ve done since January, Amy and Mike Lovell led the meeting. They call their initiative SWIM — Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee. Mike Lovell told the meeting that its genesis has been organic, meeting regularly in big groups and smaller subcommittees.
Trauma creates multifaceted problems on many fronts that can only be tackled with a broad phalanx of social and clinical work — one individual at a time.
Representatives from the county courts and district attorney's office attend the Lovells' meetings. "The justice system has learned the hard way that maintaining silos often has created unintended consequences and poor outcomes for the families it serves," said Mary Triggiano, deputy chief judge in Milwaukee County and regular attendee of the Lovell meetings.
In the past, brain science was seldom part of the social debate because trauma metrics didn't even exist 10 years ago. But trauma is rampant; the city's violence, neglect, abuse, homicide, incarceration, alcohol and drug use, as well as gunfire and police sirens all blend into a destructive stew.
"A Time to Heal," a Journal Sentinel series published last year, explored entire neighborhoods within Milwaukee where exposure to traumatic experiences is an everyday fact of urban life. The Journal Sentinel series showed that trauma and economic decline create a mutually self-reinforcing downward dynamic.
“Trauma is a response to an environment the same way that cancer is a response to a carcinogenic environment,” said Julia Taylor, president of the Greater Milwaukee Committee and member of the SWIM Steering Committee.
Just as trauma findings are new, so are the efforts to collaborate.
In 2011, after the recession of 2008-’10 had just ratcheted the urban economy down a few more turns, a Baltimorebased urban strategies consultancy issued a blistering critique of the city’s balkanized social efforts.
“There is no articulation of an overall agenda,” according to the report from Brophy & Reilly. “There is no articulation of an overall agenda,” the report said. “There is very little strategic alignment” and “little in the way of systematic communication.” The report described an “atrophied” and balkanized city with no one in charge of estimating needs and resources. Many past efforts had failed, “demoralizing the players in the system.” The city’s competitiveness was at stake.
The Brophy report led to efforts to cultivate a “collective impact” model of social and economic change in Milwaukee. The biggest foundations each singled out a few of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, where they would concentrate their efforts and pour in investment from social agencies and nonprofits. The idea was to move the needle one neighborhood at a time.
But no one to date has attempted to apply the collective impact model on a scale that covers the metro region.
"There is a lot of great work being done," Amy Lovell said. "How can we work together, break down the barriers and increase the impact?"
One way to evangelize their cause will be a conference from Sept. 2628, meant to engage people by the hundreds if not the thousands, the Lovells said. Planners are trying to recruit major national speakers as well as local leaders.
To kick off the threeday event, the Lovells booked the new Milwaukee Bucks arena, making the trauma conference one of the inaugural events at the arena, which is still surrounded by construction equipment.
Next steps include a website and social media effort, which are essential to knit any new coalition into shape. Also in the works is an "asset mapping" exercise meant to learn who else should join the group and which neighborhoods are covered and which aren't, Amy Lovell said.
It sounds ambitious to create the most comprehensive and cohesive trauma-responsive strategy that the city has ever known. But Mike Lovell remains optimistic, not least because no one previously has tried.
“We can’t really fail,” he said, echoing comments he’s heard from his own SWIM participants. “We can’t make things worse than they are, even if we tried.”