Interpersonal, systemic, and historical wounds—violence, neglect, and indignities—have profoundly shaped our relationships to power, safety, and each other. Despite our natural resilience, today's technological acceleration and social upheaval are overwhelming our collective capacity to adapt, creating a widespread crisis of meaning, connection, and personal agency.
The Journey Framework addresses this crisis by helping people recognize trauma's societal impacts and cultivate the conditions for wellbeing now—and across generations. Developed over three years by Georgetown University's Red House innovation lab with global experts convened by The Wellbeing Project, it integrates 50 years of trauma research, as well as cultural wisdom, healing practices, and systems thinking.
What makes this framework distinctive is its focus on rehumanization—restoring dignity and shared humanity in the face of alienating conditions and systems. It provides practical tools to identify harm and intervene with care and clarity, while transforming individual healing into meaningful systemic change.
Designed for anyone tackling complex social challenges—educators, journalists, policymakers, activists, and leaders—The Journey Framework deepens analytical skills and problem-solving while strengthening policies and practices rooted in collective wellbeing.
In this session, Red House Senior Fellows Dr. Mays Imad, Kate Woodsome, and Research and Program Associate Kendall Bryant will introduce The Journey Framework, an ecological methodology built on more than 50 years of research and practice in trauma and community psychology. This framework equips educators, students, and changemakers with tools to understand and engage with interconnected crises — such as climate change, misinformation, political polarization, and mental health challenges — on an intellectual and embodied level. We recognize that these are not abstract concepts, but are challenges affecting the wellbeing of students and educators in real time.
The Journey Framework fosters new ways of understanding the relationships between people and the communities and systems around them. This interrelated systems approach allows students and educators to identify and forecast the ripple effects of policies and practices, empowering them to spot opportunities for healthy, constructive transformation on a personal, communal, and societal level.
The workshop explores three core principles:
- Science of Trauma, Healing, and Resilience: Understanding how trauma shapes our nervous systems and impacts our ability to engage with systemic challenges.
- The Journey Framework: Connecting the science and sociology of trauma and healing to practical tools for critical thinking, problem solving, and transformation.
- Systems Change: Helping educators and students engage with complex problems from a multi-dimensional lens to support meaningful individual, communal, and systemic transformation in service of collective wellbeing.
Through hands-on activities and group discussions, participants will explore how to apply the methodology to their own contexts. Attendees will leave with the Journey Framework workbook, a resource supported by the Pulitzer Center, actionable tools and community for navigating complexity and making change from a more grounded, resourced state.
Participants are encouraging to fill out this pre-survey before coming so that we can gather information about how effective the workshop was afterwards:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vnz71qjvuNYwvZxDZFsP_2qLHTINn_P1lW0Cd2i9PMI/edit?ts=6823989eNote: This session will be livestreamed.
