TORCH, Trauma and Organizational Resilience, Consulting and Healing is a collective of practitioners that works with individuals and organizations to address organizational and collective trauma.
Check out our most recent publication in the Winter 2023 issue of Organization Development Review. Click on the button below to download a copy.
The thread connecting our practitioners is a shared commitment to:
Naming and addressing issues of organizational trauma, including racialized and historical trauma.
Building capacity and encouragement of individuals or groups leading through trauma.
Serving with an equity lens and healing philosophy in all of our engagements.
Believing in the power of loving energy and hope, a focus on strengths, and commitment/animation towards a positive future.
TORCH serves as a beacon of hope, resources and renewal for:
Practitioners feeling isolated and wanting to advance organizational healing and reconciliation and build trauma-informed workplaces.
Consultants finding themselves pulled into client dynamics and at the edge of their knowledge or skills.
Leaders discovering and addressing harmful dynamics that undermine organizational resilience.
Individuals refining their identity as contributors to team well-being and a trauma-informed approach.
What is the benefit of engaging a TORCH Collective member?
TORCH members bring decades of professional experience and a wide variety of backgrounds to our efforts.
With our depth and variety we offer:
Consultation and coaching services tailored to each organization’s culture, situation, and capacity.
A framework of understanding about organizational trauma and resilience and a wide variety of ways to help an organization see itself more clearly.
Diverse and complementary perspectives on the intersection of organizational trauma and other challenges facing organizations (for example, historical harm, racial inequity, loss of funding or community trust).
In-depth multi-faceted coaching for leaders.
An amazing array and depth of design and facilitation skills.
If your organization is showing signs of trauma, contact us to see how we can help.
The History Of TORCH
It started with a simple question: “can an organization be traumatized?”
In the late 1990s Pat Vivian had been working with a client system that was in trouble. As she continued working with them, she noticed that the whole organization seemed to be traumatized. It was collectively exhibiting the same symptoms as a traumatized individual. Her question, “can an organization be traumatized?” along with others including “is organizational trauma real?” and “is it an actual dynamic?” led Pat and her friend Shana Hormann to start the conversation about organizational culture and organizational trauma, which continues today.
When they searched for resources that could help them make sense of what they were seeing, they could not find anything that focused on organizations as a whole. The absence of ideas led to deeper conversations and eventual collaboration on research, teaching, and writing. Students, colleagues, staff working in mission-driven nonprofits, and organizational leaders contributed their energy, support, questions, and ideas to a framework of understanding about traumatized systems and their dynamics.
A Community Was Born
Over time, these deep and wide-ranging efforts resulted in Pat and Shana’s seminal work, Organizational Trauma and Healing, published in 2013.That same year a group of practitioners interested in this work joined together to create a practitioners’ community. They all agreed that advocacy was central to their professional identity and shared a common dedication to social justice and the desire to make a more kind and compassionate society.
The group of six women met regularly; did client work together; listened to each other’s challenges and successes; and supported each other personally. They mined their conversations to create understanding and build confidence. Over time they came to realize they could not work with traumatized organizations without the mutual support and encouragement they found within the group. They also recognized because relationships were central to healing client groups, relational support among practitioners doing this work was a necessity to making the work sustainable over time as their staying power came from each other.
They appreciated strengths, acknowledged shortcomings and learned together. They recognized that isolation - or too much “going it alone”- led to myopia and burnout. As Shana said in one conversation, “We cannot afford to be isolated in our practice because we work with systems that tend to become isolated from shame, fear, and too much self-reliance.” They wrote papers and book chapters together to share what they were learning with others. They pioneered the concept of practitioners supporting each other in organizational healing work, which has continued on since it started in 2013.
In 2018 the practitioners’ community recognized there were too few of them doing the work and it was time to increase the number of people focusing on organizational trauma consultation. They also recognized that organizations suffering from trauma were rooted in diverse communities and that representation in this work was crucial to healing and creating meaningful change - there needed to be a collaboration of practitioners that mirrored the communities being served. This desire to create a more just, equitable, and inclusive space for healing led to the birth of The TORCH Collective.
How did our current group of seemingly eclectic people come together to forge bonds and build community?
We found each other through friends, colleagues, conversations, and work projects and continue to reinforce our bonds with deep conversations, collaboration on challenging projects, and support through tough times and life transitions. Our Community of Practice creates a space for us to share and exchange our knowledge, tools and resources with others doing this work around the world. Our commitment to the principles of TORCH bolsters our stamina for organizational trauma work and helping organizations heal, just as our relationships with each other sustain our resilience and ignite our joy.
