In 2017, Exodus Transitional Community (ETC) was funded by CJII to develop the Center for Trauma Innovation (CTI). The CTI aims to serve participants who have experienced chronic trauma related, but not limited, to incarceration, poverty, racism, and experiencing/witnessing community violence. It does so through three core prongs: direct services, training and technical assistance, and a learning community.

The CTI partnered with the Center for Complex Trauma (CCT) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai evaluate the center’s impact, employing a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework to ensure participant perspectives were at the heart of the analysis.

Healing from trauma is a deeply personal and multifaceted journey, shaped by a complex interplay of individual, social, and systemic influences. At the CTI, healing is approached through a trauma-informed, relational, and person-centered framework designed to foster emotional resilience, personal growth, and community connection. This brief explores the lived experiences of CTI participants, offering a richer understanding of how the trauma-informed practices at the CTI nurture resilience, foster community, and catalyze personal growth. Through the use of vignettes sourced from individual interviews and more than three years of observational data, findings illustrate how CTI participants experience and internalize healing through their lived experiences, in their own words.

For high-level takeaways, check out CUNY ISLG’s blog.

Download the memo.

As part of this partnership, the CCT produced a process evaluation as well as a series of briefs that explore these core prongs in theory, how they were put into practice by the CTI, and their impact on participants and the community. The first memo explores the role of learning communities in this evaluation. In the second memo, the focus shifts to the use of data and collaboration to inform future program recommendations. The third memo looks into how participants’ characteristics impacted how the healed from and coped with the trauma. The above memo is the fourth.