Racial Truth & Reconciliation (RTR) Virginia (RTRVA) is an intentional evolution of the Campaign for a Trauma-Informed Virginia that further concentrates our efforts on the intersection of trauma and equity. This community-led initiative catalyzed by Voices for Virginia’s Children empowers advocates with lived experience to ignite the change they wish to see in their communities.
The Campaign for a Trauma-Informed Virginia was created for the purpose of influencing state policy to become more trauma-informed. The campaign worked towards this by preventing exposure to trauma and by adopting trauma-informed care and evidenced-based practices in child and family-focused settings. The ultimate goal of the Campaign was to connect local-level challenges to innovative best practices and advance state-level opportunities around trauma-informed care across sectors.
In June 2020, Virginia trauma-informed community networks of color convened to address the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on at-promised communities and the modern civil rights movement. They felt an innate urge to respond and react to two pandemics, COVID-19 and racism as a public health crisis. In response, there became a clear need to concentrate efforts on the impact of cultural, racial, and historical trauma on marginalized communities.
This influenced them to launch Virginia’s first-ever Racial Truth & Reconciliation Week (RTRW), which served as the launch of Racial Truth & Reconciliation Virginia, a campaign that implements the mission and goals of the week over a longer period of time. The ultimate goal is to connect community-level trends to trauma and equity-informed policy at the state level in order to champion policy opportunities that improve the social determinants of health and combat inequities. View this one-pager about the transition from the Campaign for a Trauma-Informed Virginia to Racial Truth & Reconciliation Virginia. View this one-pager about Racial Truth & Reconciliation Virginia.