Last year at this time, Communities United, a survivor-led, grassroots, intergenerational, racial justice organization in Chicago set their sights on changing the mental health landscape for youth with the help of Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The goal was to develop a wholistic plan for youth that moves the mental health conversation from one focused on individual treatment to one that supports community healing.
Their work on that path for years yielded “Healing Through Justice: A Community-Led Breakthrough Strategy for Healing-Centered Communities” — a 10-year road map to foster youth-led strategies on community healing that centers youth leadership in creating institutional change on mental health. The plan placed the medical institution and community organization in a finalist position in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Racial Equity 2030 Challenge — a global competition announced in 2020, that awarded a total of $90 million to help build and scale actionable ideas for transformative change in systems and institutions that uphold racial inequities. The challenge received 1,453 submissions from 72 countries. In September 2021, the Kellogg Foundation announced the top 10 finalists.
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While traditional medical approaches rely heavily on treatment, Healing Through Justice (developed by Communities United and informed by narratives of hundreds of young people who experienced personal and collective trauma and healing while taking social action to address issues impacting them and their families) focuses on supporting the leadership and action of Black and brown youth in Chicago to create new pathways for recovery, and positive health outcomes for themselves and their communities.
Over the past year, Communities United and Lurie Children’s moved through a process of multiple levels of review and feedback involving peer applicants and multi-disciplined experts from across the world to bring their plan to scale with a $1 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The duo are now the recipients of $10 million by the foundation to turn their plan to practice. The money will be paid out over eight years to coincide with W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s 100th anniversary in 2030.
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Laqueanda Reneau, a Communities United community organizer said the recognition and money shows that others believe in their work and want to support youth.
“When we shared the news with our young people, they were jumping out of their seats screaming,” Reneau said. “This is a global competition that wants to support young people and their leadership. The work that we do encourages youth voices, to say that lived experiences are important and those lived experiences are something that they can create and change if they want to.”
Bezaleia “Bezzy” Reed, 18, a youth leader at Communities United, and sister to the late Caleb Reed, an advocate for racial justice in the education system who died in 2020 from gun violence, said her brother would be surprised and excited about the grant amount awarded to the organization.
“I’m excited to see what’s to come and to be able to continue what we’re doing and to see that we’re being supported. I’m glad people love what we’re doing. Now we know that we’re capable of anything,” Reed said. With a goal of being a teacher, Reed is approaching her one-year anniversary with Communities United. “After his passing, I wanted to get more involved with Communities United because I saw a passion in Caleb and I was interested. I would describe myself as a witness to the work.”
The $10 million grant will be used to: Invest in the development of 3,000 young people as leaders in the community that will inform new strategies for Lurie Children’s and other health systems to support youth-led and community-centered healing; convene a network of community-based partners to support youth leaders and the implementation of new mental wellness strategies; document and evaluate the new model that supports community-led healing to improve health outcomes in communities of color. Dr. John Walkup, chair of Lurie Children’s psychiatry department and principal investigator of the Kellogg proposal, said his hope is that the model will be disseminated to church groups, schools, and youth organizations around the world.
“That’s the dream,” he said. “Some of the first year’s work is to codify this, get it down on paper so that anybody who picks it up and wants to do it understands exactly what it is they need to do it in order to replicate the results. That’s gonna be part of the project too — fleshing it out. It’s got to turn into something that has not just a manual, but guidebooks and strategies that will allow it to be disseminated and be successful elsewhere too.”
The Healing Through Justice initiative builds on the 11-year partnership between Communities United and Lurie Children’s. The work on the Healing Through Justice partnership is a fundamental part of Lurie Children’s’ 2023-2025 Community Health Implementation Strategy. Recently, the pair collaborated on the release of “Changing the Beat of Mental Health,” a youth-led participatory action research project that identified systemic inequities and the normalization of trauma as key drivers of worsening mental health among young men of color.
“It’s youth driven, it’s about racial equity to its core,” Walkup said. “This is a group (Communities United) that’s not doing it for the purpose of this grant. They’ve been doing this stuff forever. They know how to do it. And we’re just taking it up a couple of big notches with the grant. Positive programming takes such a long time to grow. But there’s something about this idea that if you’ve had a hard time in your life and you begin to put your life together and you’re going to do something special in your own life for your family and community because of what’s happened to you, that idea gets so many different kinds of people excited.
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“The power of that idea is highly contagious. Instead of having it happen by accident, we want people to understand that you can make it happen, that you can become intentional with it and really make a difference in this world that way.”
