Caring for ourselves and each other helps us to be present, to adapt, & be creative. It's also essential in sustaining our movement building work.

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We are more than halfway through the summer, actively adapting to an ever changing world. At Peace Over Violence, self-care and collective caring are important organizational values and practices. We are building safe and healing spaces, both for ourselves and our communities and we know this looks different for everyone.

For many of us, this year has felt longer than seven months; having to adjust to new ways of navigating the world and our personal spaces. Our minds and emotions have been challenged to function in different ways that can lead us to struggle with our physical and emotional well-being.

For the month of August, we would like to invite you to manually turn down your stress responses. This is a time for compassion and kindness, and a time to practice being gentle with ourselves and one another. Take solace in doing your best in these extraordinary circumstances.

Youth Over Violence Leadership Institute

By Joslyn Beard
Community Outreach and Volunteer Coordinator

This year, our Youth Over Violence Leadership Institute is helping to cultivate youth leadership for its 10th year in a row! In spite of the obvious barrier of not having physical connections momentarily, the Prevention team surpassed expectations with a whopping 90 applicants for the Institute, being held completely virtually this year.

We have participants from Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, Camino Nuevo, Hollywood High, Village Glen High School, Watts Middle School, College Bridge Academy Watts, and Orthopaedic Hospital Medical Magnet High School. We also have young folks participating in Kentucky, Tennessee, and even Costa Rica.

Through the Institute, young people ages 14-19 are building genuine friendships amongst one another. Some have connected via social media and others have discussed ways of meeting together in-person once it is safe to do so.

Participants are also showing their enthusiasm and dedication to learning and are eager to engage with our staff. Our curriculum covers several topics; the roots of violence, media literacy and advocacy, unhealthy relationships, sexual violence as well as reimagining public safety. They have actively engaged in the trainings in various ways - sharing their thoughts, poetry, words of affirmation, and they even hang out after a training has ended to ask questions or connect with each other.

The self care group led by Tylana Enomoto, one of POV’s trauma therapists and a clinical social worker, has been one of their favorite sessions thus far. Without disclosing their activity or its outcome, out of respect for the youth’s intimate sessions, their session with Tylana was so deeply interactive, the youth often mention its benefit.

Overall, there was a degree of nervousness amongst our team in having to make the institute fully function in a virtual format, however, with high enrollment and stellar youth engagement and performance, the 2020 Youth Leadership Institute has been a blast to cultivate and bring to life.

The youth will be participating in an upcoming Zoom background challenge. This entails bringing creativity, social justice, and personal style to our sessions. They will be voting on their favorites and prizes will be awarded. We invite you to follow Youth Over Violence on Instagram at @YouthOverViolence ([link removed]) to find out who the winners are!

Adapting Our Trauma Work While Sheltering-in-Place

It has been over four months since we have had to quickly shift offering our trauma-informed and survivor-centered services from in-person to solely in a virtual space. Lessons have been learned along the way and have been applied to further build upon how we help to support those who have experienced domestic, sexual, and interpersonal violence.

Understandably, many individuals prefer to receive healing support services in-person, so staff in our clinical division had to learn to use technology creatively that honored any frustrations experienced by survivors and their loved ones to make space for healing to continue. This involved staff having conversations about survivors’ needs and preferences while continuously adapting the various healing tools offered.

Staff also learned more about how people from different generations and with varying technological comforts utilize technology to address their needs. Learning this helped staff to adapt their approaches accordingly with each individual survivor in both one-on-one and group settings. For individuals seeking one-on-one services, sometimes switching between using teleconference tools or calling over the phone was what worked best.

We see our trauma work, whether it be virtual or in-person, as a way of accompanying survivors in their healing. We learn alongside them, celebrate them, support them. We continue building upon our best practices in order to better utilize and adapt technology in our healing work with survivors.

For more information or to access Peace Over Violence services, click here ([link removed]) .

Building Brave New Spaces

In our last newsletter, we shared about our upcoming move into POV’s new office space- our future home. It is a home that answers the challenges of being a responsive agency to the diverse communities we serve, and addresses the dramatically increased demand for POV’s services.

Our brave new space will embody the deep lessons of resilience, resurgence, regeneration, and radical love that we embrace in all our practices. It will allow us to more comprehensively serve our families. And it will fully accommodate our programmatic growth and service expansion needs, including launching a state-of-the-art Children and Youth Center.

We ask for your support now. We invite you to champion, share and encourage others to join with us to make this big idea happen. We also invite you to contribute to this move and become a Brave Space Builder ([link removed]) with us!

Coming Up

Still I Rise- Reimagined

Peace Over Violence will be co-hosting conversations on IG Live with Black therapists to discuss some of the needs of Black survivors and healing in Black communities. In this three-part series, we will be focusing on the past, present, and future of Black healing.

Our first conversation will be with Dr. Brenda Ingram on Tuesday, August 25th at 6pm.

Tune in by following us on Instagram @peaceovrviolnce ([link removed]) .


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Metro Headquarters
Peace Over Violence
1015 Wilshire Blvd.
Suite 200
Los Angeles, CA 90017
USA
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