Giving Compass' Take:

• Researchers developed models about accumulating stress by pulling together strands of research on community trauma, resilience, health, and vulnerability.

• How can donors help address trauma in marginalized communities? How can research help inform how to mitigate accumulated generational stress? 

• Learn about systems change through a trauma lens. 

There had been a police shooting, another unarmed black man killed. Andrea Ducas saw the protests on the news, another community in turmoil, and thought of a term from public health: allostatic load. It's the physical cost of too much stress, the toll it takes on body and mind. She wondered: Could we apply that same idea to communities? Could a better understanding of how stress builds in communities, the burden it puts on them, lead to more effective policies to confront it?

Ducas, a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, had worked for years with RAND researchers on issues of community health and resilience. She picked up the phone. The result was a new way of thinking about how racism, poverty, injustice, and other societal traumas can cut to the very core of a community.

“The intent here was to create a framework that is informed by a community's past but is also forward-looking, that goes beyond just describing the community,” Ducas said. “Once you crack that code, you can start to say, 'Ok, what do we do about it? What are some indicators that community stress levels are rising? What are some interventions that might help?'”

Psychologists and biologists have known for years that prolonged stress like that is toxic to the human body. It alters hormone levels, weakens the body's defenses, and wears a person down even at the cellular level. It's a known risk factor for six of the leading causes of death in America; it also might help explain why people of color die at much higher rates of COVID-19.

Researchers at RAND realized Ducas was right: Toxic stress, or “allostatic load,” could be a useful way to think about what happens in marginalized communities as well. They began pulling together strands of research on community trauma, resilience, health, and vulnerability.

They developed a model for how stress can accumulate in a community, generation after generation, an accretion of despair, disinvestment, discrimination, and disparity. Any new crisis—a police shooting, a natural disaster, a global pandemic—becomes a potential tipping point.

Read the full article about the accumulation of stress at RAND.