"The systems and structures of our society were created out of individualism, fear, and scarcity, and they can be refashioned based in collectivity, love, and abundance."
-Dr. Shawn Ginwright
About Healing Centered Restorative Engagement
Our Approach: Our services include a customized approach to addressing the needs of our clients. We first meet with you to determine if our way of engaging with you is a good match. Then we strive to mutually identify the challenges and opportunities, and a co-creative way for addressing them. We are committed to delivering high-quality services that meet your needs.
Mission: Healing Centered Restorative Engagement (HCRE) strives to shift organizational practices to center on well-being at the individual/clinical, interpersonal, organizational, community, and political levels. Lifting up strengths, HCRE challenges systems that create inequality and disconnection from opportunity by prioritizing preventative action, healing, and relationship.
Vision: HCRE envisions a world in which organizational cultures prioritize healing and restoration for everyone
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Values:
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Authenticity
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Collaboration
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Compassion
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Connection
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Courage
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Grace
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Harmony
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Inclusion
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Integrity
Core Principles:
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Safety, belonging, inclusion
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Strengths and values-based
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Connection and relationship
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Preventative and proactive
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Process first problem-solving
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Transformational
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Power sharing and equity-focused
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Interdependence
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Reflection and evaluation
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Making a difference
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Optimism
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Truth
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Well-being
Our HCRE Story:
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From roughly 2011 to 2020, Tracy -- with a masters and PhD in public administration and public affairs -- oversaw an AmeriCorps program in SE Michigan that specifically recruited so called disconnected youth – or “Opportunity Youth” ages 17-25 – to serve in their communities. In fact, the program enrolled other disconnected adults of up to roughly 50 years in age who had experienced many adverse experiences in their lives as well. The program became committed to reconnecting participants to systems of wellbeing, like work and school, and helped them to identify a path for moving their lives toward family sustaining careers grounded in their strengths and passions for making the world a better place.
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While doing this work, Tracy became more intimately aware of the trauma and toxic stress that had created disconnection in the lives of these AmeriCorps members and the clients of the nonprofits where they served. She reached out to Dr. Jess Camp, a social work professor who had deep clinical and macro social work experience, to learn more about human service supports that could be made available to her AmeriCorps members. That initial conversation led to many more conversations between them as they jointly became committed to identifying ways and means to reconnect and support the program’s participants and clients.
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Jess and Tracy engaged in deep literature reviews of their respective superpowers, social work and public administration, to identify evidence-based approaches to inform their programmatic work. As they explored approaches such as trauma-informed care, resilience, intersectionality, healing centered engagement, and social emotional learning - all of which were increasingly well known - they wove these into an iterative, process-based, culture-change approach to address ways that trauma and toxic stress are present in employment, organizations, and communities. It became clear from this work that trauma is a force of disconnection, and agencies need help to proactively engage in healing, relationship, and supportive connection to restore well-being.
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As their collaboration has deepened over the years, they have built on and contributed new methods and practices in the self, interpersonal, organizational, community and policy arenas. Their collaboration ultimately led them to leave careers in higher education to share and advance their approach with clients full-time.
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Jess and Tracy prefer to call themselves “pracademics” as both have decades of on-the-ground practitioner experience in the nonprofit and public sectors, but also happen to have unintentionally completed highly competitive doctoral programs which provide them with academic perspectives and skillsets, such as a continuous commitment to research and evaluation. Tracy’s scholarship is directly related to identifying and explicating alternative administrative methods to organizing and operating nonprofit and public sector agencies. Jess brings a social justice-oriented poverty researcher perspective that bridges micro and macro social work approaches.
Together with a growing number of collaborators who value their approach, they immensely enjoy coaching and encouraging their clients and colleagues to explore new ways of working and responding to our complex and increasingly challenging world.