 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show, where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. On recent shows of All Things LGBTQ, we've been talking about the legislative process and bills that are currently working through our legislature, which are of interest to the LGBTQ plus community. So joining us today is an old friend to talk about some of that legislative work because she is the person helping to do it. So please welcome back Polly Crozier, who is the Director of Family Advocacy for GLBTQ Advocates and Defenders, formerly known as GLAD. So welcome, Polly. Thank you so much. It's so great to be here, Keith. And just one teeny correction, so close, but GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders. Gladly. Thank you. There's a lot going on in that title, but yes, we are, you know, our quick name is GLAD with 1A. And as I have said to you before we started taping, I'm hoping this will be an annual interview. Well, you're not going to get my agreement on tape. No, I'm just kidding. I'm always happy to come and chat with you. I love working with you and working in Vermont, so it's always a pleasure. Well, and I was going to say, I've noticed that our legislators are inviting you more often to come into the process and not just sort of, oh, can you provide some testimony, but really looking at, okay, what does our language say? What is the language that we should be using? Are there samples from other states or other work that you've done? The two bills that are going through now, H89 and S37, H89 is called the shield law. And I know that that's work that you've done with other states. Could you talk a little bit about both of those bills? What you see as being the core of the bill, why it, and why it should be of importance to us? Absolutely. I have loved being tapped to provide some insights into this bill, both of these bills. And I just have to say just a little bit off script that I think Vermont's process, the ones that I've been involved in, have been really thoughtful and careful and in-depth. And it's something that I think one of the reasons why I really love collaborating with people in Vermont is because the legislative staff is really excellent in the legislators all seem to really want to get to the heart of the issue to understand what it is and to actually craft policy that addresses the issue. And I think that's fantastic and a real strength to the Vermont system. So yeah, I had the pleasure. So as we all know, Dobbs versus Jackson was a real showstopper of a case, not in a good way. And I think really shook us all to our foundations to say, you know, we're in scary times, right? When this U.S. Supreme Court revokes a 50-year-old precedent and takes one of our dear rights away of bodily autonomy, it's a real seismic change. And I think that I feel really privileged to be working in the LGBTQ movement at this time when it was a scary case. And though it really spurred us all to action in a way that we have, I mean, we've all been working extremely hard, but it was yet another wake-up call and really kind of created some really wonderful intersections. Like I've been doing so much work with the reproductive justice advocates and people who are really thinking about these issues broadly. Because I think that the post-Dobbs moment is what can we do to make sure that we as individuals are making decisions about our own bodies and our own lives and not the government? And how do we do that creatively as possible? And I worked in Massachusetts and in a little bit in Connecticut and a little bit in California on what we call state shield laws or provider protection laws. And it was really kind of a situation of really trying to build the plane while you're flying it. How can we in states where the deep commitment to bodily autonomy and reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights, how can those states kind of get ahead of states that are looking to restrict these rights, be creative, and do as much as possible to protect access to health care and individual autonomy? And that's incredibly exciting. And it's also a little bit of the unknown. It's uncharted territory. What we knew was we wanted to make sure that these laws were consistent with the US Constitution, because that's incredibly important to make sure that you are doing as much as you can within the bounds of the law, but also being creative. So I was Massachusetts, the bill, which was really a phenomenal effort. I was just a small part of that effort as an LGBTQ movement person. But it was a really broad group of stakeholders who got together and tried to draft that bill, which came to be known as the most comprehensive provider protection bill in the country. And that passed in July of 2022. And the fun thing about that, well, the fun thing for me was after it passed, the next week, Vice President Harris came to Massachusetts to do a roundtable about the bill and to talk about it. And I got to meet her. And I really appreciated how she linked, she saw how important it was in Massachusetts to link the right to abortion and reproductive health care and the right to transgender health care. And how we are similarly, we're all in the same struggle. The types of health care are different for sure, right? Transgender health care being much longer term and about well-being and what not. Of course, abortion health care is about well-being as well. But obviously, it's a different time period. There are some differences. But in general, we're here to protect access to health care, to protect people's ability to make their own decisions about their own lives. And I loved how she wove those threads together in any event. So fast forward to, I have a wonderful relationship with some folks in Vermont who knew about the Massachusetts law and I shared it with them. And I said, to the extent you're thinking about doing something in Vermont because I know how dearly these issues are important to Vermont. Let me share with you this model from Massachusetts. And I also shared some pieces of other states as well to say, here's what some states are doing. Here's what seems to be working. Here's what seems to be not working. So they just had some ideas and some tools to build their own best practice policy to move forward in Vermont. And that's one of the things I love about Vermont. I feel like you all are wanting to go out and see what is the best? What is the best? And then how can we add to that to make it better? And how we can use language that is specific yet broad enough that as some of those best practices change, our statute will still remain relevant and current without requiring a lot of rewrite. Yes, like you wanted to last for the long term and you also really wanted to be consistent with everything else happening in your statutory code, right? And in any event, so the two bills in Vermont, they're actually, I consider them both provider protection or shield bills. It's just like, let's say, Massachusetts did it all in one bill. And then Vermont chose to do it in two different bills, which is a fine way to do it. One is more of the judiciary, kind of the legal bill. That's the house bill. And then the other is more of the health insurance bill. And that is the Senate bill. So I think a totally fine way of doing it, of course, they work together. And together they're very important, obviously, to both pass. I think they're kind of a package deal in that regard. But the goal remains the same, which is to say, how can we make sure to protect access to reproductive health care and transgender health care in Vermont? How can we protect providers of health care? That means providers broadly, right? Because particularly in the realm of trans health care, it's not just physicians, it's physician assistants, it's pharmacists, it's nurses, it's social workers, it's psychiatrists. There's so many, it's such an interdisciplinary kind of health care. And you want to make sure all providers are protected. So it's about protecting those providers so they don't have negative impacts to their medical license, to their ability to have insurance coverage so that the fact that they are providing best practice medically necessary health care that is legal in Vermont, that they still are able to do that no matter where that patient is. It might be Vermonters. It might be people coming from another state to Vermont. It might be someone being served via telehealth in another state. The bill really says, make sure that Vermont resources aren't going to be used to hurt our providers or our patients. We're going to make sure that we're using the state's resources to provide access to health care and to make sure everyone knows that it's legal and safe and appropriate in Vermont and that you'll have access to it in this state. Now listening to you give that explanation, one of the things I would ask is, as the bills move forward, are there specific aspects of either of the bills to which we should be attentive to ensure that language doesn't change in a manner that is not going to be really of benefit to the LGBTQ plus community? And are there in general just aspects of the bill to which people need to be aware? And I will tell you that what I'm thinking and it's about gender affirmation, that one of the conversations in House Judiciary was if there is somebody who has started gender affirmation here and now they're going away to college, there needs to be included in that conversation about which college where am I going to? What would happen if they went to a state that had outlawed gender affirmation for minors and then all of a sudden they needed either supportive services or what help or what would prevent their services from being stopped? OK, you've asked a lot of very good questions in that question. First, I want to say in terms of the bills, I mean, I think there's honestly there's so many important provisions to these bills, so many. And I think it's really important to remember for an LGBTQ audience that lots of LGBTQ people need abortion reproductive health care, right? So I think for our community it is absolutely the abortion and reproductive health care pieces are very important as are the access to transgender health care. And that's what I think it's really important to remember. I really appreciate the language that talks about those two forms of health care as a civil right in Vermont. I think that's a really powerful statement and sends a really important message to people in Vermont that like, you know, we've got your back, right? That you're that we respect and include and want you're part of the fabric of Vermont like everybody else. I mean, that's really important. I also think that protecting a broad range of providers is very important because you really want to be hitting everybody who's providing the health care. I think access to the confidentiality, address confidentiality program is important. I think for many providers, I've heard this from folks in other states, you know, they do face serious threats for providing particularly transgender health care. I'm sure it happens in the abortion realm as well, but I can speak to transgender health care and having people be able to participate in that address confidentiality program I think is very important. So I think one of the things we want to make sure is that given the climate across the country, like we don't want to drive providers away from doing the health care, that is so incredibly important, right? And I think there's danger in that and we really have to do what we can to provide safety. Anyway, those are just a few points of the bill, but again, I think that the bills are really obviously important. And in terms of the, you know, what happens if a student moves out of state? That's a really great question. I mean, I think obviously, you know, as you know, states are acting to ban access to transgender health care for minors. And, you know, a few of those bans have been enjoined, right? They're not, they have passed his law, but they're not in effect. Like my colleague at GLAAD, Jennifer Levi, is on the team that's fighting the Alabama ban and they've been successful to date. I know they're doing so much incredible work and really hats off to the local people too who are testifying and putting themselves out there for this, to stop this law. And even so in Alabama and Arkansas, for example, the law is stopped, but we know it just passed, a ban passed in Utah and, you know, in this legislative session, so many bans are happening. So it might very well be that a student from Vermont is in a state where health care is banned. Now, I mean, I think the good part of this law is that obviously, you know, in that the provider that you have in Vermont will still be able, excuse me, to provide access to the health care to that student, right? Even if they're in a banned state and that provider won't risk their medical license and they'll be able to continue that care because telehealth is included in the bill. Now for that student who is in that state, Vermont can't do anything about what happens for that student in that state where it's banned. And so that's obviously going to be that person will need to consult with all the resources so they can't understand what their risk might be in that particular state. But hopefully also my, hopefully a college student would be also over 18 and the bans would not impact that student. So obviously, if you are going to a state with a ban, you're going to want to research that carefully, but their Vermont doctor or nurse or whatnot should theoretically still be able to provide them health care. So it sounds as though when the bills are finally passed, one of the things we need to be looking at is what is the public education campaign that goes along with that? Absolutely. So that people don't think, okay, this is an absolute. That's such a great point Keith, because some people I've seen on Twitter, people call some of these bills sanctuary bills, like there's really, I think kind of no such thing. And we have to be really careful about, in our constitutional system, right? Each state can choose to do what each state wants to do within some bounds, right? But other states can't control what other states do. And you're absolutely right. We have to educate our community. Employers have to educate the providers working for them. And obviously, hopefully with the goal of creating as much access as possible, but these are complex times. Yeah. I was gonna say, and with our remaining time, one of the things we had briefly talked about before we started taping is, okay, what are we doing? What do we need to do? And you had mentioned looking at H369, which is the bill about fertility services, and that this is something that would be beneficial in Vermont and something that we don't currently have. So could you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. I think access to fertility healthcare is kind of one of the next waves. There's obviously a lot of work to do in so many realms, but of positive LGBTQ advocacy. And so fertility healthcare is essentially healthcare to help build your family, right? Whether it's access to IUIs or in vitro fertilization or whatnot like helping people. And it's obviously not just LGBTQ people, single parents by choice, not LGBTQ people who have infertility. I think we really wanna make sure people have the ability to build their families. It's part of the reproductive justice we seek for our world. But in fact, fertility healthcare is not many states require coverage for fertility healthcare, only about a dozen, actually no, about 15 states. In Vermont is the only state in New England that does not have a mandate for coverage of fertility healthcare. So, which is okay. Maine just got theirs last year, New Hampshire just I think two years before that. So again, it's an emerging issue. And obviously I think it's really important for the LGBTQ movement to be involved in this. This particular bill is led by, this effort is led by Resolve New England, which is a fertility infertility advocacy organization. Well, they provide emotional support. They provide many resources to anyone who wants to build their family. And they do a lot of phenomenal work intersectionally. They're really wonderful allies to the LGBTQ community. Like they were with us and Parentage in Vermont, for example, they're really wonderful allies. And so they have filed this bill in Vermont just to bring in fertility insurance mandate to Vermont, which is essentially saying, private insurance plans should provide coverage for fertility healthcare within appropriate bounds, right? And also that the state Medicaid plan should also provide coverage for fertility healthcare. Cause it'll interest you to know, I think that actually no state provides, state Medicaid plan provides access to fertility healthcare for people on Medicaid. And I think it's really time for that coverage to happen because I think that we don't want to create kind of an us versus them, like family building and having a family, I think is one of those kind of core needs and core sources of stability to have a family in your society, if you choose to do that. Anyway, so I think it's an exciting bill. I haven't, I don't think it's had a hearing yet, but it's I think one to look out for. And it might take a few sessions. Sometimes bills do and that's totally fine, but I'm excited about it and it's similar to work. There's a similar work bill happening in Connecticut this session as well. So we'll see. I'm like, maybe Vermont will beat Connecticut to be the first state, we'll see. I mean, that's one of the things actually that's nice about not having this already is you can do it in a way that's inclusive and that helps all people, right? I mean, Massachusetts, which is, I think has one of the oldest fertility healthcare requirements. It's about 43 years old, really wonderful, but it's outdated at this point and it needs a reboot. And so I think in Vermont, there's a real opportunity to do this in a way that protects all people. So with that, thank you. And an acknowledgement of how, how integral you were to the language in the passage of our parentage bill several sessions ago. And to let people know, before we started taping, I had asked you to look at our family and medical leave bill to ensure that how families are defined truly does include our communities and the relationships that are essential to us. So with that, thank you very much. Thank you. Everybody, I'm here with Shawna Hill, a mover and shaker in Burlington in the mental health field. We're delighted she's got a lot of projects to put and we're here to talk about them. Welcome, Shawna. Thank you so much. That's such a generous introduction. It's all true. I'd like to read a little bit of a bio if I might for those of you who may not know Shawna and I'm gonna read it in the second person. Shawna was born, third person, I guess. Shawna was born and raised in the Northeast Kingdom, which many of us know. She holds a bachelor's degree in sociology and French from Middlebury. And a master's of social work in child youth and family practice from the University of Washington, Seattle. So you've left Vermont for a little while. Shawna is passionate about accelerating resilience, equity and inclusion through the integration of clinical research and innovation directly to communities as public health. And we'll unpack that a little bit in our conversation. Shawna lives in Burlington, Vermont with her family. She's a single mother of two twins. So this is all very exciting. I learned from another interview that you did live in Montpelier for a while. I did, well, I grew up here in Vermont, as you mentioned. And then I did the thing a lot of us do. I did go to school here as well, but I wanted to go adventure in the world. I went to Seattle for graduate school and stayed out there for almost 15 years, which is where I did my training and a lot of my career. And then when my babies were born, I did that thing of like, oh, I miss that feeling of life in Vermont. So when my ex and I moved back to Vermont, we landed in Montpelier right away. We both found jobs and we were there for a little while. And then I ended up here in Burlington during the pandemic. So there's obviously a lot of story between there, but I've lived in Montpelier area and down in the upper valley for a few years when I was going through cancer to be down there with healthcare. And now here in right in Burlington, Chinden County. Great. How did you happen to become interested in this kind of work? Well, I'm sort of, I always describe myself as like an accidental mental health professional because I did not go to grad school, even aware that clinicals or that social workers did mental health practice. I was going to grad school in my mind to do child and family policy work or some sort of youth and family leadership related or administrative related work. And one of those happy accidents happened where like at the last minute, an internship placement crashed out for some reason like the supervisor left. And they sort of stuck me, my program stuck me in a mental health internship, you know, doing school-based mental health. I didn't even know I'd never seen like a diagnostic manual and nothing about this. But I did really like working with kids in a school like that, you know? So I sort of took it with a grain of salt, but it never, it never left me. And, you know, my first job was not a clinical job, but my second job was because I was recruited out of a youth leadership program into a foster care program by someone who just saw that I had a good way with kids and teens basically and said, look, we'll train you to be a mental health professional. So I am not someone who knew I wanted to do this. I'm someone who sort of accidentally ended up in situations where I became eventually very well-trained as a child family and adult trauma clinician. And in terms of how this connects to, you know, queer, trans and gender-affirming mental health, which is the clinical work that I've been doing in the last 10 years, you know, I identify as a queer person. I was living in Seattle since same-sex marriage, et cetera. But mostly the connection point wasn't that I chose it. It was that I was working with youth and young adults. And I happened to be working with youth and young adults in Seattle, and a lot of them are queer. And so, you know, it's sort of one of those things where you're learning as you go because these are the kids on your case load and the kids you're working with. And at that time, this is the early and mid-2000s in Seattle, there are a lot of homeless youth not from the area who were congregating in places like Seattle and Portland, Oregon and a lot of cities on the West Coast. And what are they doing? They're creating community. Of course, they're creating, you know, queer community. We used to call, you know, use these terms that we don't use anymore, but the street kids really do build communities and they find places to live. They find ways to get money and they take care of each other. And I was doing a lot of street outreach, transitional housing, high-risk youth intervention programs. So I just sort of ended up being around a lot of young people who were struggling in a lot of ways, mental health and addiction and those things as part of it. But also underneath that, we're really having identity issues, struggling with disconnection from their family, struggling with discrimination or discomfort in their school or work settings. And also you were starting to hear more young people talking about gender and gender transition, although we had limited vocabulary and healthcare for that at the time in the 2000s there. So I was learning all the time from them. And when I moved to Vermont in 2013 with my family and I took a leadership job running a youth treatment program here in Vermont. And of course there were, you know, some queer youth in this program. And I was like the expert suddenly and part of that was that in Vermont, you know, there wasn't an ocean of professionals with that same experience. So I sort of was seen as a specialist in queer, trans, and gender affirming mental health practice by default a little bit just because I'd done so much of that work. And then I began training on it, people would ask me to speak and it just sort of like became my area of clinical expertise. I was gonna bring that Seattle learning really back to Vermont and start connecting more in the clinical community here about how we could better teach and train a set of skills, learn about gender affirming healthcare and really like build some skills for what these particular kinds of youth, young adult and adults are facing which is often much more complex than non-LGBTQ people, so. Sure. Part of your job description on the website is trauma psychotherapist and neuroscience educator. Tell us, what is that? Good question. So I always worked in programs with people with really high levels of complex trauma. So anywhere I've ever worked in my career that's also not a thing I chose, it's just sort of what the work was. And eventually I came to see that I needed real deep training in trauma techniques that I hadn't gotten. I did a lot of work the first 10, 15 years of my career to try to improve my own knowledge and training and skills. But the truth is that it often felt, I say this a lot, it often felt like I was standing next to an ocean full of drowning people holding like a paper towel while the world keeps turning on spigots of structural harm and stress. And it really was overwhelming to feel even 10, 12 years into my career like I didn't really see a lot of sustained healing, sustained wellbeing for people. It's not that therapy didn't help at all or medication or things like that. But you could see that we, especially when trauma was in play we just didn't know what we were doing. There wasn't enough information. It wasn't like I wasn't trained or someone else wasn't trained. It was like, it just was, it was always a guess. And suddenly I started hearing and this is the late 2000s in Seattle, clinicians and people in my networks talking about neuroscience. And this technique of EMDR which had something to do with the eyes and I remember we would laugh about this. Like this seems so bananas at the time that like what would that, how would that help? And this seems crazy. And it was a really alien science to me at the time but I'm such a curious person and I'm just like really relentless. And so I started doing things like going to some trainings and neuroscience conference and getting a different book and turning over those stones and I landed in the sub field that was really becoming popular around 2010, 2012 called interpersonal neurobiology which was sort of some neuroscientists and neuropsychologists really bringing some principles of that science into the mental health space to teach clinicians how we could use it in our practice. And no one had really done that in a way that we could get trained in before. And it was like everything changed when that happened. And I couldn't believe it. As soon as I could explain to a teenager and say, listen, it makes sense to me that you're not sleeping right now. Your nervous system is so anxious and afraid. So, this is not a you problem. You're not failing. You're not a mess. This is a state you are in, right? And that you make sense part and then a little bit of coaching as I learned more of what might help took a while to get good at that but would connect for them and they would come back. And teenagers are notorious that like blowing off therapy or being impotent about it. And they'd come like early and they'd be like, let's talk about panic attacks. Let's talk about mood. And they were interested in this. And so at first my interest was this seems to engage people who are skeptical or disengaged that if you tell them some science and then you make sense part, that helps. I shifted away from wanting to do a lot of clinical work and into more seeing the potential to take that science and do something more public health style with it as my own skills grew because what I realized was I was seeing you make sense to everybody. Every, like the more I was trained in this neuroscience the more I could say whether we were talking about real complex trauma, obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction issue or relational problem like pick an issue. And I suddenly had this map inside because of this neuroscience training of being able to say to someone, oh, this makes so much sense. Let's look at why or how this is happening and what we can do today that might help you feel better tomorrow which is very different from let's talk about your childhood or let's talk again about was this an up or down month for your depression, right? And suddenly it was like you were giving people a road they could walk they were making more sense to themselves and they could start to like really do something for themselves. And the change that was happening was rapid in my clients. So I was so sold by what I saw happen in clinical work that I started thinking about how you would apply neuroscience more generally to teach people about resilience, mood, behavior, sleep anything that they struggled with addiction and got to work thinking about how you would educate people outside of the treatment system. And I can say a million things more about that but once I got interested and I could see that it did something that no other mental health tool had been doing and that it was doing it for everybody no matter who was in front of me I couldn't like stop the trajectory of shift toward becoming more of a trainer consultant and innovations, you know thinker about that science. Well, that's what you mean because you talk about transforming mental health into public health. Is that what you mean? It's exactly what I mean. And you know, the idea of that you don't have to be into neuroscience to know that that's what we need to do. I think folks look around and they see that people can't get a therapist that weightless everywhere they can't get a prescriber and also a lot of folks anyone who's listening who has ever been in mental health treatment knows that just because you have a therapist a prescriber or some kind of care doesn't necessarily mean you feel like it's been super helpful. Maybe it's not hurtful maybe it's even a little helpful but rarely do people find that kind of medicalized mental health treatment something that they can first of all sustain over time and that it really heals them, right? They're not really reporting that it like changed their life they're reporting it might be a little better than before. And the neuroscience stuff is the off ramp to accepting, you know sort of that maintenance support as a model. And so the call for turning mental health into public health is about this undersized workforce the scarcity in the field the economic barriers that people have but also the science itself just lends itself to that. So when you can say to folks if you have a brain and a body here's some things that will always regulate your mood here's some things that are true about anxiety or about sleep or about your relationship with substances that will always be true if you have a brain and a body and you can sort of think about them a little bit in a sequence and you can put that out to people in a lot of different ways and as my co-founder my company and I started innovating some ways to do that we would try it out train folks can you teach parents can you teach teachers can you teach pediatricians more about this stuff using that science and it turned out you could and it was all the same science you just changed the vocabulary so when I train doctors the slides look a little different and the words look a little different but it's really the same science as when I train childcare educators or camp counselors. So it was a train that was moving on its own basically through my own curiosity and I think COVID then convinced me that it was a moment to really shift the work we had been doing and look at how you could scale this and just say mental health needs to be seen as public health that's the only path you know with the level of need out there and that it's also faster and really pretty effective if you can get this information to folks way faster. Tell us about state change. So state change is the company I co-founded 18 months ago with my very long time work wife and colleague Nicole Hapeman. Cole and I met seven years ago down in the upper valley area of Vermont where we worked together at a therapeutic behavioral alternative school it's a public school a regional school for kids with very disruptive behaviors a lot of trauma and special education needs and we met there and had one of those like powerful work connections where you recognize each other and what I recognized in Cole was that she was also always thinking about how this model doesn't really work but how could you somehow take our expertise and sort of give away the store so we would find ourselves like during lunch or taking a walk talking about like what would you teach up down brain or would you teach like we were doing this in our free time for a friend we would meet and talk about if you were gonna train all the doctors around here to better understand trauma so they could be more helpful what would we tell them? And we did a lot of that noodling on it for a while and then began working as independent trainers but COVID-19 created a set of circumstances that could have never been foreseen but were really an opportunity for us which is that when the world shut down you know, I'm sitting at home thinking like oh my gosh, there's a tsunami of mental health need coming and it won't even be right away it'll be longitudinal it'll be like 18 months from now I knew that addiction, family violence, depression, anxiety overwhelming all of that was coming at a level that we hadn't seen and my second thought was oh my gosh and people are gonna care about it and there will be money there will be money there'll be private market money there'll be public money like I suddenly saw that this thing we had been doing at a very local, regional level might have an opportunity because we had a lot of data on what we'd been doing we had a ton of success our work had been growing we really had a model at that point and I was thinking this is the moment when the whole world is looking for mental health solutions and they were not before but they are now and guess what, we have one and we've been doing this work for a while so we co-founded the company in January 2021 and we're both clinicians but what we do here is create media and training programs and training products so these are things like asynchronous workforce programs and things like that but all on mental health content so we have a podcasting arm of the company that's building our first big podcasts debuts in a couple of weeks which is exciting we have, we're doing a huge build of workforce training programs on things like burnout restoration stress resilience improving focus and productivity and brain-wise work habits cohesion and communication psychological safety at work and then we have a suite of programs that are for managers things like understanding mental health considerations in your workforce and supervising people who are struggling interpersonally for example so there are all kinds of projects in the pipeline we're also doing work on a new model for climate anxiety and environmental mental health resilience that's rooted again in the same science model that we have but the company is taking off largely because the community, the country and frankly the planet is looking they don't quite know what they're looking for but they're essentially looking for expertise like this in some other way that they can access that isn't in the medical system and folks like us mostly stay over there that's mostly what we do we stay over there or we teach or we go into private practice but we don't typically enter into spaces where we try to do something at scale or where we try to have some larger impact it's just not particularly common that folks with our expertise even think that way so we did think that way and saw the moment and started a company and now we've got a team of four with another maybe 10 active advisors and contractors working with us and we're about to start fundraising to build our own learning platform which is a pretty big deal but it couldn't have even happened without the pandemic really I think because it created a moment of shift an economic interest that wasn't there for mental health solutions really before, if that makes sense well what this makes me think of I was living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and afterwards there was huge mental health need there and the solution was they were doling out anti-depressants and medications like it was candy you didn't have and so this seems like a much more focused and improved model that you're working with after the trauma of the pandemic It really is and you know Hurricane Katrina was just long enough ago that even if I'd been sitting there New Orleans or some other clinicians who I'm sure were well trained were sitting there we didn't really have the science on what I call under the hood like how we're actually built how it all operates and why like what does the system in the body prioritize and de-prioritize but we have all of that now and so if you're if you're able to learn that and be trained in that you know like I am the sky is the limit of what you can do with that but in the absence of that even you know not that long ago with Hurricane Katrina folks like me knew what we were offering wasn't enough but we didn't know what else to offer so the anti-depressants the you know benzos the all of the sedatives and the you know cognitive behavioral therapy or whatever kind of group counseling or whatever supports they were giving really were the best tools and those tools are coping tools right they're like right they help you float through the harder time with some stability some more relief better than if you didn't have those tools usually but they are not healing if you take that SSRI those anti-depressants away or if you the counselor goes away the person often is immediately back in their trauma symptoms their depression and their anxiety and so truly those community level crises like Hurricane Katrina like COVID need these types of responses but this is the first time we've really had the type of applied neuroscience available to folks where you could really make a use of it like this so it's an exciting time for us it's a really exciting time because it again it's it doesn't feel good to work like that it feels really good to work like this and anecdotally I've been talking with friends who are saying to each other we need a trauma psychotherapist but there isn't one in Vermont so this interview is very opportune on this score or the few that there are are so booked out in advance that maybe you can see somebody next year kind of thing so you know it's a public health crisis and because if you're needing a therapist for trauma specifically it usually means you're pretty uncomfortable and it also usually means that there's some you know it's a ton of work to keep your life sort of functional and upright if you're doing if you've been pulling that off at all the need of when it when it's a trauma related need is is urgent you know waiting a year to get onto a therapy list if you maybe want to do some relational work or something is different you know but or if you have moderate anxiety you know waiting is an ideal but is okay but with trauma not that lack of availability of well-trained trauma clinicians especially in rural places in rural communities is is an extreme crisis and I keep a very small private clinical practice still of I only serve basically queer and trans and other sort of hard to serve clients meaning folks who need real comfort and safety to have a trust with a therapist and I'm trained in complex trauma so I do complex trauma work but I never advertise I never tell anyone I do this work I don't take folks in or out very often and I have to sort of hide that practice because I can't even manage the inbox flow of when I used to have my practice advertised because my wait list has been closed for a thousand years right and and so it is true not just in Vermont but in lots of rural places especially you may have no therapist or one that really has no trauma training and that can be harmful so we need particular tools for people with trauma if we know they're not going to get that an individual clinician like me to meet with you every week and do real integrated trauma work and now we have some tools that we can be teaching people that are safe that they can use to help themselves so that is very exciting for me what is the core tool kit for well-being just switch gears a little bit maybe I love this so one of the things I started to notice as did Kohli when we were first doing this like how would you how would you teach all this kind of thinking was that if you zoom out and look at human beings sort of I always say overall of human history in all cultures and all places like what are the things that are sort of patterns among human beings in general right and if you look at those you see the ingredients of physical mental and emotional health so things like being in community you know obviously having your basic needs met food shelter safety connection because connection and community are linked to safety right so all cultures all people in all time always have some structures of that and then people have what they do all day so they have you know occupational tasks they have creative activities they have downtime where they're like in you know in their own space or in their own head they move around a lot right it's a modern problem to be sitting all day but for most of human history people are walking moving carrying and doing labor right so that is a very like sort of cheat sheet kind of way to think about what would make a body healthy what do we actually need what do we evolved for because we're evolved for a variety of different things to happen every day we're evolved for human relationships to be the core system by which we get our safety our basic needs met so again if that's if people don't have good community or social connections we know that that is a system emergency and people are built to have diversity of what they do all day and that includes movement that includes focused work and breaks from that work and it includes like new thinking or what you know coley and i always call it like novel input meaning learning or a new person or a new idea and some balance of that and some cycle of that as well as some routines and cadence to life is like the sweet spot for most of us and you know that if you've ever been in a place in your own life where things feel actually pretty good if you look around you probably have that right you have some connection you have routines but also some new you know things that kind of spark you alive some creative pursuits and no one area is out of balance and no one of those areas is missing so that's the core sort of the core toolkit that we could recognize and then as we got better science on that what we realized is oh you can really teach this as a resilience model that there's an order of operations to it right safety in the body and you know body threat or body crisis is always priority number one always if we don't feel safe either because of covid or abuse in our home or any you know history of trauma if we don't feel safe we can't expect good mood we can't expect great executive function we can't expect our relationships to be you know to have much to bring to them or to trust them can't be a good parent can't you know it's really hard to do those things so safety and then the next one is really about the connection and relationships and if that domain of life is is disrupted or someone's in too much isolation then mood will wobble behavior will struggle concentration executive function sleep will wobble it's science right our bodies don't want to be alone and isolated and overstressed they want to have this feeling of connection and so you can put a bunch of things in order like that safety community and connection and then purpose and activity rhythm and routine like creativity all of that stuff and as you line it up people will report their mood improving again all of those capacities coming back online and that's without medication that's without you know therapy of any kind it doesn't mean those tools might not also add something to the situation it really depends on what someone's doing but it means that whoever you are if I can line this up for you this is do these five things in this order if you have a brain and body you will feel better the more of these things you do and the more your life looks like this then I think people come away feeling pretty empowered like there's something they could do the next day on their own behalf and it really goes back to that sort of core science of what were we evolved to be doing all day long like how is it built in here versus what does it look like we're actually doing all day long sitting on computers or living in isolation or not getting enough exercise you know diet is you know off or whatever it is and those things are just a scientific recipe for the stuff that we see right for for mood stuff relationship problems that are so I love that part because it starts to feel more like you can hand someone a toolkit and they can take it with them and figure out how to apply it and maybe they can even hand it to the next person and I get excited about that you know that if I hand you that toolkit and you got some benefit out of it and you're like hey I'm a therapist said and then you teach it to a person she said focus on this this this first you know it it has a ripple effect to get a little more technical what's the universal accelerated resistance model is it the shane kind of thing yeah the resilience model yeah so what we did is when we realized we wanted to learn to train this content to a variety of people we've had to then ask ourselves okay how do you train to a bunch of different adult learners first of all truly we're not interested in training people in a way where we talk at you and download information because people don't learn well that way and they definitely don't learn relational skills very well that way right like that's just not good learning so we knew that if we went to the science of learning we would get some information about how to do this so we started teaching in a way that involved using these simple concepts and teaching them in a certain order and doing a lot of interactive activities so people could put it the thinking or the idea into practice and imagine or even role play scenario and out of that work and we studied what different kinds of professionals we were training thought about that content and what they got out of it what they liked and over about five years after training thousands of healthcare providers childcare providers teachers in Vermont New Hampshire we the data was pretty clear they liked the same stuff we liked frankly and they liked it when we let them put it to use and imagine for themselves and to practice it and that really became this universal accelerated resilience model meaning this moves the needle very quickly right in a way that no other model that we're aware of or no other approach so far can do which is if you take one of our trainings you will have five actionable skills and strategies the next day to use in your work or in your life regardless and that we want to have taught that to you in a way that really landed in there that encoded that like settled in a way you could put to use not that luxury style like here's a bunch of info and again as that work has grown what we found is you can take that same model that universal accelerated resilience model and repackage it with different language into almost any space where people are struggling with each other with burnout with stress with mood connection with any kind of mental health struggle and so we've now taken it out of sort of where it started which was like people who work with people we were training people who work with people and we've moved it to any kind of workforce can do this parents this is a great way to train parents both to help them think about their kids but also take care of themselves and one thing I like about the model a lot is that if I teach it to you even if I'm teaching it to you say as a parent right like you're here because you want to support your kid better right I teach it to you I always start by teaching it to you about you and having you practice it on you what is my you know red zone versus calm zone look like where are my areas of stress depletion and we never talk about the kids first I teach you the tools for you and then we skip and start talking about kids after that and how to apply it with kids but we make sure you learned it for you first that is that way of putting the you know put your air mask on first thing into practice but it's also frankly more effective that parents will be better at using these strategies with their kids if they practice them on themselves first so the the universal part the goal was could you teach to anyone and apply it anywhere and so far that has been true so who are the main clients of state change who's your target sure so for a long time we are continuing to do work that we've been doing for a long time that we were doing as independents before so we train births to five in preschool educators in Vermont and New England all the time in a model that we call the be resilient model which is half like educator mental health and stress support and resilience and half strategies and tools for working with young kids and meeting increasingly complicated needs we train healthcare providers locally and we've done a lot of that live training work but we're shifting the business model right now to be building asynchronous learning content so we're you know we're we're right now about to do video production on these training videos that will go into these courses that gets you know sold into enormous workforces you know they'll go into the healthcare workforce space tech other large workforce spaces and that same content when you build it you can then sort of repackage and turn into consumer media and that is where i'm excited to go in the future which is a learning portal that will be available for you or for anyone you know if they want to take a one hour twenty dollar course on helping children with nighttime anxiety come down and go to sleep you can come in and do that if you know is that all the ask a therapist needs we will have a whole universe of content available that people can sort access share etc to to circumvent that whole we got to find a therapist to help us with this and get people really the practical actionable stuff they need if you are a person who has panic attacks and it's debilitating you we want you to have you know the course or even series of courses that's going to really ground and integrate your nervous system and heal that and it'd be great if you had a therapist to do that with but you don't have to in order to do it now and for most folks the webinar online you know that comes from folks like us is higher bang for your buck than like the tiktok content or the instagram content or the sort of general mental healthy stuff that people are putting all kinds of stuff out there which i love but it's not always helpful so the ultimate goal is to have a consumer facing learning portal and community where people can come whether it's mental health addiction family and relational things and there is a real expansive library of answers to their questions and learning content so they can get what they need directly and when will that happen do you think well i'm not sure exactly but it's really on a roll so you know things are growing fast with the workforce facing programs and because that is a market that is just waiting for us they don't have folks doing this work so that that grows the company pretty quickly i expect in the next six months we will be hiring and growing our team our media teams and our content and training teams and producing more of that work and then the next phase phase two is to work on that consumer facing so i imagine that we'll be building that work in 2024 maybe coming out 2025 you know it's it takes a while to build a really robust library of subject matter expert led content that's well made and science rooted and effective so we have to grow a team to do that and that's the phase we're just starting right this minute so it'll take a little bit of time but that's the goal that's fabulous this is very exciting it is it's so exciting and i will say you know one thing one thing you'll hear from a lot of mental health folks especially those of us who work in the queer and trans community a lot is that it can be very hard to feel hopeful and it's a hard field it's hard to be a trauma clinician for 22 years it's hard to do this um you know we take it a lot and we often don't feel you know super successful at really helping people um we certainly don't feel like we can change some of the circumstances in the world that just keep creating trauma and i love being a clinician and i will always have some small amount of clinical work because i love what that can do for someone and and because people really can benefit but the turning my career toward being a media creator a startup CEO an educator and a sort of thought leader out here telling this story is so much more hopeful it's so much more optimistic and it feels smarter at a better use of my time and that's part of my own state change and resilience story is that i had to create a new relationship to what i could do with all my training and expertise and i wanted to put my heart and work and time into something that could do more than that that paper towel feeling i was talking about so it is very exciting and also a nice second act i think you know for me and for collie and for us to to have an impact but also get to step away a little bit from you know very intense trauma facing work for decades sure on a hill thank you for joining us thank you for joining us and until next time remember resist