Challenge Day Highlights: Health & Wellbeing, LT'21
To keep you connected to LT and current issues and topics discussed in the curriculum, LT shares highlights and resources from the recent Challenge Day.
The Health and Wellbeing Challenge Day was centered around these questions: White, western culture views health and wellbeing in an individualistic way, but we know that the social determinants of health contribute in a major way to a community’s health. What does collective wellbeing look like? How could we build collective wellbeing? What would our legal/justice system look like if we believed in supporting and investing in the potential of all young people?
The day was designed to support these LT curriculum outcomes:
Community and Belonging: Build strong connections among people across many lived experiences. Feel inspired and empowered to act by belonging to an enduring community of regional stewards.
Regional Challenges and Opportunities: Understand regional challenges and opportunities and how they are interconnected, including how systemic racism impedes our ability to create a healthy community for all.
Leadership: Grow skills, tools, and strategies to act as a leader and change agent in one’s own chosen area, including an ability to work within and across sectors to address systemic racism and build a more resilient and equitable region.
This write-up is a brief overview of the day and is organized around the three curriculum outcomes. To get a feel for the full day, read the agenda here. For a full list of resources related to this Challenge Day, read the prework here.
Many thanks to Virginia Mason for their sponsorship of this day and leadership in our community.
Social Determinants of Health
Roxana Chen, LT’07, Curriculum Committee, framed the morning by reviewing the social determinants of health. She highlighted the important link between where people live and their health outcomes. Where you live impacts your access to opportunities in education, employment, healthy food, and medical care. Due to our history of neighborhoods being segregated by race, white people and People of Color often live in different neighborhood contexts. This example of systemic racism has profound impacts on health outcomes for many People of Color. As Roxana said, “Place matters because race matters.”
Resources:
Regional Issues & Leadership
From Problems to Possibility
Dr. Ben Danielson, former Sr. Medical Director, Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic; Sean Goode, Executive Director, Choose 180
Dr. Ben Danielson and Sean Goode passionately discussed the public health issue of youth incarceration, making the case that incarcerating children is the antithesis of a healthy community.
Sean spoke about operating from a place of grace and seeing possibility instead of problems. “When you see a Black kid as a possibility instead of a problem, you are helping them exit the school to prison pipeline.”
Sean and Ben left us with a powerful call to action: we must do everything in our power to not waste this moment and to make choices (big and small) everyday so we can create the world we all want to live in. The pandemic has demonstrated our capacity to change and pivot. If we can make changes in response to COVID-19, what can we do to address longstanding issues?
Resources:
Read: The Dangers of Detention: The Impact of Incarcerating Youth in Detention and Other Secure Facilities
Explore: King County’s pages on Zero Youth Detention and its Roadmap to Zero Youth Detention HERE and HERE.
Community & Belonging
Envisioning Community Wellbeing - How to Take Action and Manifest Your Visions
The class journaled and met in small groups to consider how they will take action to manifest their vision of community wellbeing in the places they live. Following the small group discussions, class members shared what actions they could imagine taking in the next week to bring part of their vision to life in their community or professional leadership context. Their responses included:
Recognize that healing is part of justice.
Donate money to BIPOC groups.
Bring awareness around seeing problems as opportunities to develop and co-create possibilities (make it about the collective) rather than as problems to solve (which is about making oneself feel good).
Lean in for understanding, rather than pushing people away.
Inquire why processes are what they are.
Really check in with people during our 1:1 meetings.
Embrace, empower, and promote change. Collective wellbeing shouldn't be a political issue. It should be a right.
Don't solve problems...create possibilities!
Resources:
Read: The World we Need Must be Built by Community not Courtrooms
Read: The Future of Healing: Shifting from Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement
