HEAL PA: One Year In

At the beginning of September of 2025, The Change Campaign officially took over as the fiscal agent of HEAL PA, Pennsylvania’s statewide system of trauma-informed care. The initiative that started under Governor Tom Wolf got lost in the reorganization during the transition to the Shapiro Administration. The Office of Advocacy and Reform that Governor Wolf began that housed HEAL PA lost its capacity, and after efforts to change that were unsuccessful, HEAL PA’s Executive Steering Committee searched for a 501(c)(3) to be a backbone for the effort.

I know they met with other nonprofit organizations as well, but I pitched them on The Full Press as a vision for where HEAL PA could go, and they found it compelling enough to entrust The Change Campaign to lead the effort forward. It was an exciting opportunity. First, I had gotten involved in the trauma-informed movement as an intern for the PA Attorney’s General Office of Public Engagement in my second year out of college, where my project was to help develop the idea of what we called at the time the Pennsylvania Trauma-Informed Care Network, which was a predecessor in some ways to HEAL PA. It was a full circle moment over an eight year span - nearly to the day - from when I started that internship to when The Change Campaign became HEAL PA’s fiscal agent. Second, I had spent a lot of time developing The Full Press as a mostly academic exercise. During my time at CTIPP, I had learned about and witnessed different policies and practices that informed the creation of and continue to inform the development of The Full Press, but it had not yet had the opportunity to really be implemented anywhere. HEAL PA changed that, and it was awesome that my home state could be the first.

Now a year in, there have been some wonderful moments, as well as many where the rose colored glasses have come off, as we have worked to revitalize HEAL PA. I figured this was a nice opportunity to look back at what I have learned, and look forward to where I believe, or at the very least hope, HEAL PA is headed. HEAL PA is not my project, it was developed by others and continues to be supported by a team of people, as I will get into, but I feel fortunate to play a meaningful role in it and will speak from that perspective, not of control, but of contribution.

The last year can be split pretty evenly into halves, before and after a new Executive Steering Committee had been formed. When The Change Campaign first became fiscal agent, the prior Executive Steering Committee voluntarily rolled off at the same time, as they had all been in their roles longer than the Standard Operating Procedures said their terms could be. The change provided an opportunity to roll out of their positions, before they did that we made some slight adjustments to the Standard Operating Procedures to enable: 1) me to act on behalf of HEAL PA until a new Executive Steering Committee was formed; and 2) HEAL PA to have a fiscal agent rather than needing to be positioned within state government. 

There were two major accomplishments in the first six months of the last year with HEAL PA. The first was working with the Hope Beyond Hurt Coalition serving Bedford, Cambria, Fayette, and Somerset Counties in South-Central PA. Before The Change Campaign officially became the fiscal agent for HEAL PA, I was introduced to Hope Beyond Hurt’s leaders by one of the original Executive Steering Committee members. They were a couple years into launching their coalition and reached out to reconnect with HEAL PA. Our introduction was welcome on both sides and we got along great from the beginning. They loved the idea of The Full Press and it fit with the work they were trying to do locally. After a Zoom meeting, they invited me out to meet with their group at their next meeting, so I drove out to Somerset County in November. For the first time, after so many presentations where I have slides, I just went there to meet their group, learn from them, and share about HEAL PA and The Full Press. It went great.

Hope Beyond Hurt had some money in the bank (I believe they had a grant of around $5,000 that enabled some initial infrastructure buildout), but they were a volunteer organization. At our meeting was a representative from their local health conversion foundation, who was interested in the conversation. Hope Beyond Hurt’s ability to pilot local application of a broader statewide effort was appealing to the funder, and The Full Press helped articulate the strategy and theory of change that Hope Beyond Hurt’s work is doing. They did the lionshare of the work on the grant, but I joined some meetings with and without funders and reviewed/suggested some language for the application, and within about a month of that meeting the grant was submitted. 

Though I am getting a bit ahead of myself in the story because it takes time between applying for a grant and getting the decision back, they were awarded $68,000 from that grant, allowing them to hire part-time staff and begin to spread their work further into their community. They also have successfully applied to other funding sources, and it has been incredible to watch their capacity grow so quickly. I will get into some other successes over the first year in my role with HEAL PA in a bit, but this was the most meaningful to me. I have said from the beginning that my goal was to make a meaningful impact in Pennsylvanians’ lives. Regardless of what HEAL PA does moving forward, it was a supportive entity in facilitating investment into a local coalition. Nothing can take that away and I look forward to seeing how that work grows. 

The second was the process taken to build out a new Executive Steering Committee. I felt a ton of pressure as this process unfolded. HEAL PA required a five person Executive Steering Committee, so I needed to find four other people. Two fears came creeping in: 1) what if four other people don’t apply? 2) what if more than four other people apply? I constructed a process and put out the announcement to the only listserv I had access to, and fortunately a dozen people applied. Over the course of the next few months, I collected applications, had a lot of calls and email correspondence to answer questions people had (both about the Executive Steering Committee and HEAL PA generally), and then conducted interviews.

There were some interesting tensions that I found myself navigating during this period. First, people were excited that HEAL PA, after over a year of dormancy, was getting reinvigorated, while also being skeptical (or at least wondering) about how and why I was now leading it. Second, it was hard trying to lead a process in a trauma-informed way with absolute authority in the decision making. I leaned into the trauma-informed principles to navigate this as best I could. I centered honesty (Trust and Transparency) as I communicated, sharing what I knew and also being honest when there was a question (and there were multiple) that I did not know the answer to. It was a good practice for me in leadership.

Everyone who applied for the Executive Steering Committee was a solid applicant. From the beginning, I said that my priority was to ensure demographic, geographic, and professional diversity across the applicants to represent the breadth and depth of HEAL PA’s network. I told every applicant this during the interview first and foremost, in addition to ensuring alignment with the effort and that they were able to dedicate the time necessary to revitalize HEAL PA. I was not in a position to determine who was more or less qualified or worthy, literally every applicant had more professional experience than I did. Everyone was qualified. All that I tried to do was create as representative a leadership team as possible so the work could continue. Fortunately, the Executive Steering Committee gelled pretty much right away. Our first meeting was about six months ago, so that gets us into the second half of the first year, revitalizing the network.

The first couple months of the second part of this first year were spent developing strategy as a group. This worked well as it corresponded with the same time that I was finishing up my degree and capstone project about The Full Press and a plan to implement it through HEAL PA. As I said before, it was fortunate that the group gelled quickly. We found complementary roles and embarked together through updating governance documents and network engagement.

I will spare the details of the governance updates for the interest of your interest. I wish I could have done the same for the Executive Steering Committee members. While it does not make for the best story, it was important work for us to do. More interesting is the network engagement. We sent our first network email to the existing emails we had in May and had our first meeting at the end of that month to reengage people. We were able to get decent participation in those calls, where we introduced ourselves, our thoughts on how to revitalize the initiative, and then connected audience members and solicited their feedback on what had been shared. There was some confusion and a lot of enthusiasm, so we moved forward with our plan. 

One of the challenges that we faced was that while the initiative had grown dormant, we were working to revitalize and not altogether recreate HEAL PA. We strategized a lot around how to fit new concepts in an existing infrastructure that could reenliven itself toward the goal of making Pennsylvania more trauma-informed. One of the biggest issues HEAL PA faced in its first iteration was that it created and then tried to hold a dozen separate action teams focused on different sectors and topics, which was impossible to manage when the initiative lost capacity. It was shocking that it could be done when there was the limited capacity it ever had. But that was where those who were involved in HEAL PA engaged with it, so it was an important arm. 

We set out a strategy that played itself out over the summer to reimagine what the action team structure could look like, one that wasn’t so cumbersome and was better integrated into a single organization rather than separate efforts that didn’t communicate with each other. Led by the Executive Steering Committee member who was involved in an active existing action team, we met with folks to hear what they thought worked and could be improved upon. Every meeting led us to new ideas, and this week, we presented our proposed structure on a call. 

In addition to the action teams, coalitions joined HEAL PA in its first iteration and are core to The Full Press. The leaders of Hope Beyond Hurt applied to and are part of the Executive Steering Committee, and lead our coalitions group. Unlike action teams, the coalition group never found a formal process or connecting routine with each other. They each did work in their own regions, they connected occasionally with others, but there was organizational muscle to develop to build learning loops into the flow of the coalitions. We had a number of meetings similar to the process of the action teams where we learned what worked and what could be done better, what folks wanted, and developed a strategy to fulfill that. We are ready to launch regular meetings for the group that will begin this fall and run and develop moving forward. 

In addition to working with the network, I have had many meetings with officials from the Pennsylvania state government, and some from county and municipal governments, about HEAL PA and The Full Press. From legislators to agency staff to folks in the Governor’s office, I have met with and discussed the work we are trying to do. The good news is that people like the concepts that underlie the work and the approach we are taking. The bad news is that with all of the craziness going on in public systems it has not yet fully found a foothold. Recently, within the last month especially, there have been some really promising conversations. But there is not yet a place within government that we can point to and say that The Full Press is being integrated. 

It’s funny, when I first sat down to write this, I was feeling less positive about the first year than I am now having thought back more deeply through the past year, but it will sound less rosey for a bit. I thought that we would be further in the process than we are right now. I am an optimist by nature, try to combine that with a healthy dose of realism, but always stay hopeful for what could be possible. I expected that I would be able to help facilitate more capacity for HEAL PA than I have been able to in the first year. I am thrilled that I was able to play a small role in Hope Beyond Hurt getting meaningful funding for their work, but I thought I would be able to do the same for HEAL PA. I have had a few advanced conversations with foundations, but they have all ultimately wound up declining to invest in HEAL PA at this time. 

I may live in DC but I was a Pennsylvania kid. In so many ways I still consider it my home, even if my license is from a different (non)state. I want this work to succeed so badly because I think about the supports that I was lucky enough to receive that helped me thrive. In my nonprofit work in Philly and internships for state government, I have seen so many Pennsylvanians who did not get the same support that could have helped them thrive too. I am well aware that while I have met a lot of people, there are so many more that I have not met. There are real impacts to any delay in providing the resources and supports individuals, families, and communities need. People die or otherwise experience traumas that cannot be undone everyday. It has been an ongoing test of patience in my work for nonprofits, especially indirect services, well beyond just this past year supporting HEAL PA. I will always have high hopes for the work I do and enter, and try to make other people’s lives better as quickly as I can for as long as I can. I am proud of the work that has been done so far and hopeful for the work ahead. 

As I hinted at earlier, but will say explicitly now, the one thing that is true that I did not expect to be true a year ago is that I have still not successfully raised any money for HEAL PA. I did sign my own check so that HEAL PA could have its own bank account for when it raised money, but other than that there has not been a penny. For the team to have done all that it has, for us to be in a position of revitalizing a network and statewide initiative, is impressive.

Another piece that I learned through this is that it is much different trying to revitalize something than to launch it from scratch. Certain things are easier, the name is there, a listserv already exists, to some extent goals and processes have already been agreed upon even if they are updated a bit. But there is also a sense of hesitation that accompanies the excitement from many people who were let down from when the initiative became dormant. To start a movement you need momentum, and that has been more challenging than I expected to enliven. I hope that as we enter into the work we are doing to further engage the network and move the work itself forward, as we have some bigger wins, that it will create more of that momentum we need.

I was talking to a long-time mentor and supporter of my work beyond just Pennsylvania earlier this week. As I wrote in my blog post last week, I came back from vacation wondering if there was something wrong with me that keeps the work from growing. So I told her that I had been thinking about that, told her that we have built the type of relationship where she can be critical and not worry about hurting my feelings, and asked her what she thought. She appreciated the question, even if taken aback a bit by it, and complimented me for continuing to think about how I could grow. She told me she’d need to think about it more, but said that her initial thought was twofold: 1) that I couldn’t go too big on anything, and that in some ways it would have been inappropriate for me to do so while I was in my role with CTIPP; and 2) that until three months ago I was still a graduate student running two organizations and that took a lot of my time as well. She promised to think about it further so I am sure that I will hear about her thoughts on our next call, which I look forward to, but it was a nice reminder to assess my work in context.

Throughout the summer I have felt less weight holding me back, a good illustration of which is me writing these pieces weekly. Summertime is tricky because most people take some version of time off (whether that be a step back with work or full on vacation(s)), myself included. So I am hopeful that the revitalization efforts really take hold in the fall and moving forward. There is so much good work that needs to be done and we need an active and growing network to accomplish the goals we have for HEAL PA. This first year was a lot of work, and even if it looks like we only moved a bit, we created a strong foundation, often the most underappreciated work because it is generally not seen by the public, but it makes what grows from it possible. I am so grateful and proud of the team I have gotten to work with on this, look forward to the team and our work growing, and am excited to see the good that comes from our work on many levels.