Knowledge Community Series

(Sheila) – The Texas Alliance of Child and Family Services Knowledge Community Series uses a book in common to explore ideas to improve services for Texas children and families. The book changes every year and explores many ideas that can help professionals reimagine their role in child welfare. This year’s book is My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem.

Book Details
My Grandmother’s Hands is a book that defines and explores ways to heal racialized trauma. Resmaa Menakem, who is a healer and a therapist, maintains that while we will continue to battle racism through reason, principles, and ideas this is insufficient to address the real problem of intergenerational trauma as it lies embedded in our “soul brain” and “lizard nerves.” He believes that trauma is passed through families by abuse; through unsafe structures, institutions, and cultural norms; and through our genes as is being revealed through recent work on epigenetics. His hope, and our hope, is that through reading the book and participating in the exercises that readers will create a “little extra room in your nervous system for flow, for resilience for coherence, for growth and above all, for possibility.”

Time Commitment: 
You can dedicate as little or as much time as you can to this Knowledge Community by reading the book and coming to the monthly meetings lasting an hour each starting in May. Committing to read My Grandmother’s Hands is optional for the conversation but highly encouraged. This book is an extremely interesting approach and a much-needed paradigm shift in the treatment of racialized trauma for all groups who are participants in the process. Please join us if you are interested in learning more about racialized trauma and healing in child welfare to broaden your perspectives and learn how you can be a solution to the problem.