Joy Gilfilen, Host of iChange Justice, interviews Debbie David, President of the Restorative CommUnity Coalition, about new tools and the sciences behind Trauma Informed Workplaces. Debbie is a Home Care Aide with decades of professional and lived experience working with people of diverse abilities, mental health issues, and the types of trauma that comes from incarceration, military service and 1st responders working on the front lines.

Debbie discusses how there is a plethora of new knowledge related to healing from civic trauma that is excellent. This includes the emerging awareness in systems thinking called the "biocracy". Walter B. Cannon, a physiologist in the 30s, coined the term, and now today, suddenly, people understand that our societies are part of a living system, and our interactions with that system affect us all. Understanding the links between our ecological, social, civic, and living conditions affects how we live and respond to crises. A new level of integrated research has come out related to NEAR - neuro-sciences, epigenetics, ACE's and Resilience research.

Atul Deshmane talks about "Leadership in the 21st Century" with Joy Gilfilen, host of iChange Justice.  We all must learn to move with the times. Leadership in the past was about popularity, political support by corporate interests, and who people were connected to in a popular election environment. It's what we had then.  This is now.  It's a new world with millions of dollars entering even local and statewide campaigns, skewing common sense into hyper-reactivity and groupthink. 
Today, we are in a new fractured and divided society, where profits, algorithms, media spin-doctoring, false facts, speculation, and sheer and blatant FEAR-mongering decide popularity and movements.  This interview is about helping people understand that we need real leaders to guide us.  We need thinkers, listeners, questioners, visionaries, and people to lead who are thinking about the effects of their decisions on the FUTURE. The future of our children, humanity, climate change, and how we must challenge historical behaviors to find new pathways to the future.  

Tally Rabatin joins Joy Gilfilen, host of iChange Justice in a discussion
about how we can team up across sectors to learn how to invest
differently in our communities to disrupt the unrelenting cycle of homelessness and degeneration that has been harming our children and families. What does it take to invest in prevention, intervention, re-education, and other new learning ways to promote sustained independence for current and future generations?

Tally speaks as the Community Engagement Director at LydiaPlace.org, a community-based non-profit that has 45 staff who serve 250 families and individuals experiencing homelessness in Whatcom County.
They currently use the housing 1st model to lay a foundation, then provide
wrap-around services such as a Parent Support Program (early childhood education, school readiness, and parenting support) and a Mental Health Program (with individual and group therapy sessions).

First aired 4/14/22-What about taxes? Do you understand them?

This episode is about taxes and how they really work in our lives in Whatcom County. Taxes directly affect law enforcement, the courts, and the judicial system. All these systems consume taxes. So how does that money get generated in Whatcom County? All tax money is generated by individual and small business taxpayers. What's the difference between using sales vs. property tax to pay for infrastructure costs? Joy Gilfilen replays an interview with Steve Harris, a 27-year veteran of law enforcement. He has been studying how taxes work in Whatcom County because it is different in every city, county, state, and across the country. It is complicated and gets more complex when you look at who receives and uses tax money and who decides how the money gets distributed.

iChange Justice host, Joy Gilfilen talks with Liz Darrow, producer of CommunityVOZ, about the complexity of growing food in the 21st century.  Liz serves as the legislative advocate and media coordinator for Community to Community Development at foodjustice.org, so has learned the complexities of how farmworkers are essential workers living in the spaces where climate change, disasters, jobs, justice, families, immigration, public health, and the economy collide across social justice, economic and political lanes.
Join us to listen to fresh perspectives about challenges, opportunities, and the difficulties people face when those who control systems and write laws do not understand the essential nature of growing food itself.  How do our glass walls and misperceptions complicate our behaviors, our social systems, our cultures and civic realities?

Joy Gilfilen talks with James White of Vancouver, British Columbia, to discuss the learning curve in his field of community living as it has transformed over almost four decades as our society has evolved in understanding the human challenges people face in the aftermath of civic patterns of domination, economic displacement, and extremism.

James is pioneering leadership work with ESATTA (Empowering Self-Advocates To Take Action) workers cooperative. They have discovered that because of the challenges they have lived through themselves, they have experience and a gift for teaching others how to learn about self-leadership, empowerment, and how to work with others in an inclusive manner. They have been working in multiple cities across Canada as they are expanding their programs. Mayors and civic leaders love their approach!

Joy Gilfilen, host of iChange Justice, brings a new style of discussion to the table from a researcher who was a Wall Street bond market trader. He talks about how so many people in our society are siloed by our jobs. We become experts at doing one thing, and do not realize how this one thing links to another.

In investigative journalism, people often talk about following the money trail. In this case, we are "following the number trail". How does a 911 incident or arrest produce a case or cause # (a ticket) given by a police officer, become a tracking number inside a municipal system, and a bond that is traded on Wall Street as part of a municipal asset bundle that produces revenue in retirement funds? Most of us working in each step of the paper trail transactions have no idea what the numbers mean, how they change form, or how to track them individually. Mostly we don't recognize the links and why this matters to us in our individual communities. It is all obscured behind layers of changing numbers embedded deep inside our complex systems of law and justice.

Collectively they are each different, yet all are confronting a large array of natural and man-made disasters, police reform, homelessness, violence, and justice system issues.

Karen then explains how people in cities across the nation can sign in to be a compassionate city...and if you go to

https://compassionateusa.org/

there are many resources and tools to assist people in handling the trauma and stress differently.