Donna Minter, Crixell Shell, and the (i.e. MN Peacebuilding) are finding new audiences and growing interest at the “epicenter” of the racial justice movement in the United States.

Minter and Shell, executive director and assistant executive director respectively, are both master trainers of the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program, based at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at ��ݮ����. 

Scroll down to see Crixell Shell speak with STAR Lead Trainer Katie Manfield about systemic racism.

“What started as a spark has turned into a movement,” Shell wrote in a about MN Peacebuilding’s work. “People are hungry for this information. We’ve moved beyond ‘trauma-informed’ as a buzzword to respond to essential shifting in our community due to George Floyd’s murder by police. Our conversations include racial justice and equity, and trauma is no longer something for solely the privileged to speak about — it’s for all of us.”

A , the largest newspaper in Minnesota, highlights the organization’s history and current broadening influence. Minter brought the first Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience training to her home state in 2010. Since then the organization has trained more than 5000 people in racial healing, trauma awareness, restorative justice and resilience and self-care. 

Minter and Shell believe the time is right for their racial restorative justice work to broaden and take hold, the article says.

“Right now, we’re the epicenter of what’s happening in terms of a social justice movement,” said Shell, in the Star Tribune article. “In response to what’s been happening, people have had a lot of pain.”

MN Peacebuilding has been contracted by the City of Minneapolis for 15 trainings between now and fall for anyone who lives, works, and/or plays in Minneapolis, among other expanding work. Representatives of organizations that have participated in MN Peacebuilding’s trainings say they’re effectively building on the foundation of trauma-referenced and historic-harms work.

As part of her work, Shell also convenes monthly racial healing and learning talking circles as the Minneapolis affiliate of . The racial healing and reconciliation organization, which started at EMU and is now a program of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), brings together descendants of slave-owners and enslaved people. There are more than three dozen chapters in 16 states.

Minter and Shell share the view that STAR’s strategies are a foundational resource for empowerment to make and create healing and structural change. 

“MN Peacebuilding creates space in communities to learn shared history, build connections, heal wounds and take nonviolent actions together for transformation,” writes MN Peacebuilding’s Communications Coordinator Gemma Eissa in the e-zine article titled “Making Minnesota the Peacebuilding Power State for All.”

In 2019, Minter was honored with the Melanie Greenberg U.S. Peacebuilding Award of Excellence from the Washington DC-based, international Alliance for Peacebuilding.

For more information or to support MN Peacebuilding, visit their website . You can also purchase tickets to , a virtual women’s film festival on Aug. 26, with proceeds benefiting MN Peacebuilding’s racial and economic equity trainee scholarship fund and programs. 

Learn more about systemic racism

In this installment of STAR’s “Care Together” video series, MN Peacebuilding’s assistant executive director Crixell Shell talks with STAR trainer Katie Mansfield about systemic racism.

Nearly 15 years after its original publication, a new edition of the is Threatened was released by SkyHorse Publishing this week. Author Carolyn Yoder integrates new theories and developments in the field with the book’s justice-and-conflict-informed approach to working with individual, community, and societal trauma. 

Although revised before the COVID-19 pandemic and protests in the United States against systemic racial injustice, the book addresses the dynamics of collective trauma, when our sense of safety is eroded. Individuals and groups are more likely to act and react from the survival behaviors of fight, flight and freeze. The capacity for heartfelt ways of relating and problem-solving abilities can be diminished. On the other hand, times of crisis are times of opportunity. 

“The core principles of the book feel truer and more relevant than in 2005,” she said, citing the sections on the types of leaders – reparative, destructive, and malignant – and the processes needed to address group trauma: releasing the physical effects of trauma, acknowledgement of the issues and root causes, doing justice, and conflict transformation.  

In a time of pandemic, “the collective” encomposes the whole world, says Yoder. COVID-19 is also a shared trauma, meaning that helpers – medical and mental health practitioners, humanitarian workers and first line responders – are experiencing the same threat as those they serve. Thus, they are more vulnerable to being traumatized themselves.  

STAR rises from 9/11

The core concepts of the Little Book of Trauma Healing are based on the curriculum of the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program (STAR), which Yoder, as the first STAR director, created with faculty of EMU’s in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Funding for the initiative came from the organization Church World Service.

“STAR was innovative in that it was designed for communities and integrated concepts from traditionally separate fields of study and practice,” Yoder says. STAR draws from the fields of interpersonal neurobiology, psychology, human security, restorative justice, conflict transformation, faith/ spirituality.

In the years since 2002, hundreds of STAR trainings have impacted thousands of people on six continents. The curriculum has been adapted for a variety of contexts, including racial and historic harms, veterans, youth, families, and refugees.

While Yoder says that written material “can’t begin to capture” the impact of a STAR training with experiential exercises that “bring the core concepts to life,” the original Little Book of Trauma Healing has a legacy in its own right. 

‘A gift that keeps on giving’

Over the years, the book has been translated into Portuguese, Korean, Burmese, Spanish, Russian, and Dari and other languages are in process.. The spread of these ideas across language barriers has been “one of the strongest affirmations” of her work, Yoder says.

“This little book is a gift that keeps on giving,” shares Donna L. Minter, founder and executive director of the Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute. Minter has taught STAR since 2010.

“Readers share that it allows them to connect being trauma-informed and resilience-oriented with restorative justice strategies for healing, transformation, and empowerment,” Minter says.

Others have told Yoder that the book “helps people to name and address trauma,” both on a personal and systemic scale. She hopes the book helps individuals and groups prevent traumatic reactions and cycles of violence in this time of increased global turmoil.

New analysis and scholarship

Additions to the book include a focus on neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, research into the success of nonviolent resistance movements, and more material about structural trauma. 

Polyvagal theory conceptualizes “what happens to us at a physiological level when we feel safe or when we feel threatened.” To the traditional “fight or flight” model, polyvagal theory adds more emphasis on the “freeze” response. This is when a person becomes physiologically immobilized, collapsing or submitting when they cannot escape an unsafe situation, such as being in a war zone or in a threatening home or work space. Yoder explains that when any of these three stages happen, they cannot skillfully navigate positive social relationships or creatively solve problems. “This creates cycles of violence,” she said.

The increased emphasis on structural trauma in particular came from Yoder’s colleagues at CJP, from whom she sought feedback while writing the revision.

“Structural trauma comes from living in a system that is unjust or discriminatory in some way,” Yoder explains, such as “living in poverty or systemic racism or homophobia. Crises like the pandemic and yet another murder of a person of color lay bare these injustices.”

 David Hooker, a professor of the practice of peacebuilding at the Kroc Institute, says that the book’s increased attention to historical, cultural and structural causes of trauma makes it “an essential introduction to trauma for justice advocates, community organizers, leadership trainers, and anyone concerned with personal and collective manifestations of trauma.”

Yoder also included scholarship from Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia University Press, 2012) by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. Their research indicates that nonviolent resistance movements are twice as effective as violent ones.

This “challenges the myth of redemptive violence,” Yoder explains. “My colleague Donna Minter says ‘STAR is about transforming the energy of trauma into nonviolent power.’ This is one way individuals and groups break cycles of violence.”

To purchase, visit or . Group discounts are available for those purchasing more than one copy. Inquire at bookorders@skyhorsepublishing.com. 

This article by Nzar Sharif is republished with permission from The Citizen, an independent Harrisonburg-based news website with several EMU alumni involved, including co-founder Andrew Jenner. We encourage you to support their work: Visit the and .

The Citizen often gets to news before we do. In this case, an email from alumnus Tom Brenneman alerted us to Katie Mansfield‘s virtual dance parties — check it out, he wrote — and Katie said The Citizen was already on it.

With countries banning mass gatherings and governments and health organizations are urging people to practice social distance to stop the spread of COVID-19, people are having to get creative to make contact with each other and unite amid being quarantined. 

After Virginia’s governor declared a state of emergency, one Harrisonburg resident started Dancing Resilience as a virtual dancing community to do just that. 

The aim of building this online community is to make people feel connected, but in another form, said Katie Mansfield, Dancing Resilience’s founder. 

“It felt important to honor the need to stay home/stay out of circulation to protect the most vulnerable bodies and to honor the need to connect with each other and celebrate love and hope. I had just come from facilitating a STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) training in Washington D.C,” Mansfield said. “The tension and anxiety were so high, and my co-facilitator and I realized how much fear was gripping people, not just the people we were with, but many people all over the world. She and I worked hard to interrupt the sinking into fear and to amplify the vibration of love.”

Mansfield, who works for ��ݮ����’s as a lead trainer for its Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program, is working to finish her PhD in expressive arts and conflict transformation. Her specific focus is on “Re-friending the Body,” which explores how “arts-based, embodied learning is critical for us to transform the violent patterns, historical harms, disconnection and mechanization that define so many social experiences these days,” she said. 

Mansfield started building the online community among her close friends, but once word spread, it became a global virtual dancing community where people joined the community from different states and other parts of the worlds. Mansfield dances five times a day for 20 minutes at a time, and others join in.

Right now, “Dancing Resilience” is a private Facebook group that’s spread by invitation, so Mansfield said if people are friends of hers, or friends of her friends, they can request to join the group, which “seems to work” for now.

The inspiration for it also came from social media.

“I read a Facebook post from my friend in Florence, Italy. Along with her challenges, she shared the  in many locations to sing out their windows at a certain time of day to diminish isolation during mandated social distancing. It made me wonder what I and my friends could do, and for me the natural answer was dancing,” Mansfield told The Citizen.

Soon after, the private Facebook group which she called “Dancing Resilience” started, and within a few days, 228 members had  joined. 

“Most of the participants are friends of mine, with whom I have danced before, in person. So, we have a great embodied memory of sharing space and movement and love,” Mansfield said. “Some of the participants are friends of friends, who just want to connect and move. It’s been awesome to reconnect with some friends I haven’t seen or talked to in weeks or months or years.” 

A global reach for ‘Dancing Resilience‘

So far Dancing Resilience has participants from 17 states and six other countries, including Canada, Kenya, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago and the UK. Ages so far range from 2 to people in their 50s.

Christine Cole, who is from Trinidad and Tobago, said she found joy and happiness when she was able to connect again with Mansfield and many other friends whom she met in Harrisonburg when she attended a Summer Peacebuilding Workshop at ��ݮ����. 

Carol Subino Sullivan from Atlanta is another participant who dances frequently. She said she hopes that the love, beauty and movement Mansfield has generated reverberates and inspires similar communities to spring up.

“This is a great way to cut through the isolation to bring community, joy, movement and hope in a dark time–in a way that still keeps us from spreading the virus,” Sullivan said.  “With creativity, caring, resolve and technology, we can flatten the curve and protect our human community.” 

Sullivan’s daughter, who is now almost 2 years old, received a liver transplant last year that saved her life. But the medicine her daughter must take affects her immune system, so reducing social contact is important. 

“I cannot take any chances, so I’m practicing strict social distancing,” she said. “I had let all of my dance communities know that I would no longer be attending in person.  I told friends I wouldn’t be able to gather with them for occasions we had planned.  Though my resolve was firm, I still felt sad — dance, friendships all of these nourish my soul and help me to bring my best self into the world.  Katie’s invitation to join the virtual dance community met me at that place of sadness and created a path for our souls still to connect and be filled.” 

Paulette Moore joined from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory near Toronto, Canada. She focused on the importance of dance and body movement especially in the time of uncertainty. 

“We need to remember that our own energies create our worlds and dancing transforms both our personal and collective energies,” Moore said. “People have become so data-driven, technologically-dependent and social media-focused that I believe many have forgotten we have bodies — and our bodies are the key to not just how we survive — but how we thrive.” 

Songs that match the mood

Mansfield said the music arrangement typically starts with something slow to allow people to arrive and stretch. Then, “it moves into something that evokes the water element, praying for water, and feeling our own fluidity,” she said. 

There is not a specific dancing style. Dances could have different movement and rhythms each times. 

“People are invited to move however they please,” Mansfield said. “Some people don’t look at the screen much, just dancing in their own space to the music provided. Others get pretty interactive with other dancers by coming closer to the camera and engaging intentionally. Sometimes I invite individuals to lead us one at a time. Some people who’ve joined are deeply skilled and trained dancers, while others of us just like to move our bodies to music. Some of us don’t move much at all.”

Before the playlist ends, participants will dance to a song or two “that are connective, celebratory, and/or power-honoring,” she added. 

“Sometimes I’ll put in songs that acknowledge the difficulty of isolation, the vulnerability of our humanity, as well as songs that emphasize possibilities, hope, and strength,” Mansfield said. 

But one constant is that the playlist always finishes with the song “Resilient” by Rising Appalachia. 

Not only is Dancing Resilience connecting people and freeing them from isolation across the globe, but it’s also an outlet for others in Harrisonburg, where the universities, schools and other businesses have closed.

Donna Schminkey, an assistant professor of nursing at JMU, is a participant from Harrisonburg, who is self-isolating because of risk factors in her household. 

 “The opportunity to reach out and be a part of a ritual that happens at more or less set times a day, to check-in with other people and see that we are not alone in the world, and to share music and movement with each other — this is the holiest thing I can think of doing right now,” she said. 

Breaking the isolation — virtually

Just as important, she said dancing with others — even virtually — makes her and her family feel less lonely, less isolated. 

“These days are full of opportunities for us to show each other the best of our shared and individual humanity,” Schminkey said. “That is what Katie has created for us.  It is beautiful, and it is something that in our former life routines, there ‘wasn’t time for,’ but now, we can be present for each other and attend to the sacred together, multiple times a day.”

It’s also offered a welcome break from her work in trying to shift her classwork online to help her senior nursing students through their last weeks of college “so they can join the ranks of healthcare professionals who are on the frontlines of this pandemic.”

“There is an urgency to my work, and it involves spending hours at the computer typing and talking,” she said. “To stand up and move and immerse myself in journey dancing is a great gift.

And for my daughter, the dancing resilience provides structure, and connection to the outer world, as well as a chance to move, even on rainy days. It is beautiful that we can both be meeting new friends and their pets in this virtual community.”

Learn more and download the STAR e-book at: http://www.emu.edu/cjp/star/sept-11th-commemorative-book

Find out for yourself how STAR can transform the world.

STAR is an evidence-based trauma awareness and resilience training program. STAR brings together theory and practices from neurobiology, conflict transformation, human security, spirituality, and restorative justice to address the needs of trauma-impacted individuals and communities. STAR is housed in ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

STAR is an evidence-based trauma awareness and resilience training program. STAR brings together theory and practices from neurobiology, conflict transformation, human security, spirituality, and restorative justice to address the needs of trauma-impacted individuals and communities. STAR is housed in ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

STAR is an evidence-based trauma awareness and resilience training program. STAR brings together theory and practices from neurobiology, conflict transformation, human security, spirituality, and restorative justice to address the needs of trauma-impacted individuals and communities. STAR is housed in ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

STAR is an evidence-based trauma awareness and resilience training program. STAR brings together theory and practices from neurobiology, conflict transformation, human security, spirituality, and restorative justice to address the needs of trauma-impacted individuals and communities. STAR is housed in ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).