Taking reins in addressing trauma
MU’s Lovell champions new proposals
Marquette University President Mike Lovell wants to inject new intellectual muscle into Milwaukee’s efforts to break the cycle of poverty, crime and joblessness with programs that focus directly on the city’s crippling epidemic of trauma.
On Tuesday, university officials will announce the “President’s Grand Challenge,” meant to collect ideas from the school’s faculty as well as nonprofits and social agencies. The idea is for the university to create collaborations with community groups, which can compete for funding for test projects. To cast a wide net, Lovell said his challenge is vague and broad by design.
But once the proposals are vetted, Lovell predicts they’re almost certain to include treatment for neurological trauma — a condition that exists on an epidemic level in Milwaukee, where children in some districts routinely are exposed to homicide, neglect, abuse, violence, incarceration, alcohol and drugs as well as gunfire and police sirens, statistics show. Widespread trauma, in turn, worsens the ongoing social crisis in a city that for decades has defined the national extremes of poverty, unemployment, incarceration, infant mortality and broken homes, public health researchers concur.
“I can’t imagine a proposal that comes in that does not address an outcome of trauma in the city,” Lovell said. “We’re looking at areas of Milwaukee with great economic and health disparities and we know most of those communities suffer high levels of trauma.”
Lovell became university president in 2014, moving across town from his previous post as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Like other Jesuit universities, Marquette aspires to engage in its own urban com-
munity, he said.
In the case of Marquette, the challenges are acute: 25% of the homeless beds in the state of Wisconsin are located in the immediate vicinity of the university, Marquette’s researchers have found. Too often, trauma in parents repeats itself as children grow up with traumatic experiences, creating a generational cycle, Lovell said, echoing the findings of trauma researchers.
“I feel I do have an obligation with my position, I do have a platform. I can’t think of anything more important to me, that’ll have such a big impact for the community we are in, than to address the impact of trauma and to break the cycle,” Lovell said in an interview.
“A Time to Heal,” a series of multimedia stories last year in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, documented how trauma was the core problem for many people who struggle with depression, mental illness, suicide, an inability to find and hold a job, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress that often are similar to that seen in military veterans.
The series explored entire neighborhoods within Milwaukee where exposure to traumatic experiences is an everyday fact of life — exposing entire generations of children. What’s more, the series showed that trauma and economic decline are interrelated and selfreinforcing. Marquette’s Law School sponsored the Journal Sentinel’s series through a research fellowship from the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.
To encourage proposals in his challenge from the city’s trauma researchers and trauma-informed agencies, Lovell personally has championed the issue. He works in partnership with his wife, Amy, who founded an advocacy group for youth mental health, called REDgen, following a spate of youth suicides in the city’s northern suburbs in 2013.
For the second time this year, REDgen on Friday convened a conference of regional trauma experts and activists. In both cases, they met on Marquette’s campus and Mike Lovell presided over the meetings, guiding discussions meant to reach out to those who are struggling.
A trained engineer, Lovell wants the conferences to break down dauntingly big problems into a sequence of smaller and more manageable solutions — a process he calls “problem decomposition.”
At Friday’s meeting, he also handed out copies of his “grand challenge.” In November, the university separately hosted an “Epidemic of Trauma“conference, where the university president also spoke.
“It is obvious that President Lovell is personally vested in finding solutions on a comprehensive scale,” said Paul Alt, an architect who designs therapeutically healing spaces and attended Friday’s trauma conference.
The Lovells said they personally know too many people affected by traumatic experiences to ignore the scope of the problem.
Further, Lovell acknowledged his personal journey with trauma. Using an internationally recognized scale called the Adverse Childhood Experience survey — which asks how much violence, neglect or abuse one witnesses growing up — Lovell said he scores a five.
According to statistical probability, that would rank Lovell in a high-risk category for a potential host of lifelong behavioral and physical health ailments.
However, Amy Lovell added that Mike also scores high on separate questionnaires meant to measure human resilience — the ability to overcome adversity. “Further, he devotes time to take care of himself,” Amy Lovell said. “He’s a marathoner and triathlete.”
Too often, trauma in parents repeats itself as children grow up with traumatic experiences, creating a generational cycle, Mike Lovell said, echoing the findings of trauma researchers.
The Lovells say that resources to treat post-traumatic afflictions are costly, scarce and many families cannot afford to intervene. The stigma of mental illness also prevents many from seeking help, Amy Lovell said.
“Sometimes when you are in a struggle, it becomes your ‘normal,’” Amy Lovell said. “So when things escalate, it sometimes takes someone from the outside to say something.”
The idea is to find ways to extend counseling to those who need it but also to understand how to cultivate resilience.
“The good news is that kids come out on the other side of this and lead very successful lives,” Mike Lovell said. “The good news is that it’s reversible.”
Target resources
Lovell’s initiative is in its early stages. The university president said he doesn’t want to replicate existing efforts. Nor does he want top-down academics from outside the neighborhoods to impose solutions, but instead wants to coax activists within “some of Milwaukee’s most challenging neighborhoods” to submit their own ideas, which in turn can be used to create new collaborative teams of experts to tackle the major problems.
Lovell already told his faculty last month about his plan to collect ideas. On Tuesday afternoon, officials from Marquette and Johnson Controls will outline the plans at separate meetings in two neighborhood centers: the Neighborhood House of Milwaukee, on the near west side near Marquette; and Journey House on the near south side. Both belong to a network of neighborhood settlement houses that are central to the current urban strategy of the city’s foundations — to concentrate resources into a handful of neighborhoods rather than attempt to blanket the entire city.
Lovell’s idea is to encourage as many new solutions and teams as possible. The Lovells hope that the ideas that grow out of their trauma initiative can feed into the president’s challenge — although technically the trauma initiative is separate from the president’s challenge.
The president’s challenge will provide $250,000 for two years of seed funding for one of the proposals that seems most promising. Lovell said that’s just the beginning. He recruited Johnson Controls Inc., the Milwaukeebased Fortune 500 engineering group, as a private-sector co-sponsor and cofounder.
For the Lovells’ trauma initiative, the couple also formed a steering committee to advance the cause.
Joining Lovell on the seven-member steering committee are Tim Grove, chief clinical officer for the SaintA social welfare agency and one of the region’s leading trauma specialists; Julia Taylor, president of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, a nonprofit civic group; Franklin Cumberbatch, who is active in the city’s neighborhoods for Bader Philanthropies Inc.; Bob Duncan, executive vice president for Community Services at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin; Jon Lehrmann, chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin; and Grady Crosby, who heads diversity and public affairs at Johnson Controls.
The notion that trauma is at the heart of the city’s problems is so new that many of the region’s agencies and researchers continue to work in isolation, not yet having begun to collaborate. Lovell’s group has thrown its support behind an effort by SaintA to inventory the nonprofits and agencies that are trying to understand trauma and understand resilience.
“Five years ago,” Lovell said, “we weren’t talking about trauma.”