How to help urban young people progress? Nurture hope.

Shawn Ginwright, Jerome T. Murphy Professor of the Practice, at the Graduate School of Education.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Nation & World
How to help urban young people progress? Nurture hope.

Liz Mineo

Harvard Staff Writer

August 7, 2024 7 min read

Youth development specialist promotes holistic approach to healing, growth of individuals, communities amid poverty, drugs, trauma

A series focused on the personal side of Harvard research and teaching.

During his sophomore year at San Diego State University, Shawn Ginwright worked at a middle school. He befriended and mentored a student there named Michael, and on the day when the two were to visit Ginwright’s college, Michael didn’t show up. He had been killed in the driveway of his apartment building. He was 15 years old.

The young man’s death stunned all those around him, including Ginwright, who began to see how much trauma and hopelessness Black youth face amid the poverty and crime that plague many urban neighborhoods. He felt that he’d found his calling.

“What happened to Michael shaped how I thought about my career and how I wanted to spend my life,” said Ginwright, Jerome T. Murphy Professor of the Practice at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “I realized that it wasn’t just the issues of poverty and the influx of drugs, but that young people were losing hope.”

Ginwright went on to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and become a scholar of youth development and social and emotional learning. With his wife, Nedra, he launched a summer camp in San Diego in 1989 for Black youth to offer resources for healing and growth, and later, he founded a nonprofit in Oakland, California, to empower marginalized youth.

“I realized that it wasn’t only Michael, that there were thousands and thousands of Black young people who were losing hope, had no vision of their lives for the future, and no avenue or pathway to achieve it, except for drugs and so forth.”
Shawn Ginwright

“I realized that it wasn’t only Michael, that there were thousands and thousands of Black young people who were losing hope, had no vision of their lives for the future, and no avenue or pathway to achieve it, except for drugs and so forth,” said Ginwright. “My work has tried to understand both the conditions and secondly, the solutions for young people to have pathways out of misery and hopelessness.”

Ginwright has written four books on Black youth development, youth activism, and urban education. He is known for his theories of radical healing and healing-centered pedagogy, which embrace a holistic approach to addressing the challenges faced by American youth. His ideas also serve as a rebuttal to programs that focus on prevention through discipline and fear.

“Radical healing was a response to the dearth of programmatic ways of thinking about Black youth and to the belief that Black and marginalized youth are problems rather than possibilities,” said Ginwright. “It also came from the idea that you must understand what’s going on in young people’s lives and how they experience trauma. Some youths are not just thinking about suspensions or dropping out of school; they’re worried about being shot or killed.”

Ginwright’s approach seeks to overcome the limitations of a trauma-informed focus in youth development programs. His thinking sprang from a conversation he had with a young man who was participating in an initiative he was running in Oakland in the early 2000s.

“This young man said to me, ‘I don’t like to always talk about the worst thing that ever happened to me; I want to talk about my dreams and hopes,’” said Ginwright. “That made me think about the gaps in trauma-informed approaches because naming somebody a trauma victim does not acknowledge their assets. You can be wounded but still have assets, dreams and hopes. Healing-centered engagement involves a more holistic way to support young people who experience trauma.”

“You can be wounded but still have assets, dreams and hopes. Healing-centered engagement involves a more holistic way to support young people who experience trauma.”
Shawn Ginwright

Around that time, Ginwright also experienced something of a personal crisis as he was dealing with the pressures of pursuing a doctorate, raising money for youth programs, and caring for his young family.

“I was so stressed, and one night I just woke up crying, uncontrollably sobbing,” he said. “I shared that with the young people one Saturday morning, and it allowed them to see me as a human being. Part of our journey working with young people is how we must be human with one another.”

Through his work, rooted in more than 30 years of experience, Ginwright hopes to both broaden the concept of behavioral and mental health and shift the approach that considers trauma episodic and only experienced by individuals. Trauma can be also environmental, said Ginwright, and healing needs to happen at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels.

“Behavioral and mental health is also the fact that young people may have shame because their mother uses drugs, or they’re not sure where they’ll be living next week,” said Ginwright. “It’s racism and discrimination. The fact that young Black people walk into a store and are followed around also affects their mental health.”

He noted that “part of what I’m trying to get people to understand is that we have to widen our understanding of what creates trauma to come up with responses that are holistic because while we need to treat individuals, the entire neighborhood, the entire ZIP code is experiencing trauma.”

Christina Villarreal is a lecturer at the Ed School who specializes in ethnic studies in education, teacher education, and trauma and healing. She says that Ginwright, who was her master’s thesis adviser at San Francisco State University and a member of her doctoral dissertation committee at Columbia, has helped bring about change in the field.

“He is somebody who has pushed against pathology, which happens a lot in our field — a tendency to focus on the problem rather than solutions,” said Villarreal.

“I’d say that at least over 10 years that I’ve known him, because of his work and research I’ve seen so many people move toward thinking differently about how we approach trauma, especially in schools, specifically that young people are more than the trauma that they experience.”
Christina Villarreal

“I’d say that at least over 10 years that I’ve known him, because of his work and research I’ve seen so many people move toward thinking differently about how we approach trauma, especially in schools, specifically that young people are more than the trauma that they experience.”

Working with young people to help them heal from trauma requires imagination, said Ginwright, who would like to see behavioral and mental health conversations taking place in basketball courts, beauty salons, or barber shops.

“Young people experience all kinds of trauma, and they have no way to talk about it,” said Ginwright. “When we created our first camp in San Diego, we were overwhelmed by the amount of sorrow, hopelessness, joy, and beauty that these young people brought in.”

He also noted that transforming the lives of individual young people pays an additional dividend: It helps change entire communities.

“I changed listening to their stories year after year after year, and [it] gave me a sense of compassion, empathy and joy,” said Ginwright. “Because when you see young people who have experienced trauma and still desire joy and want to be embraced and be hugged, that shifts you. What I’ve learned is that it’s not just what we do for young people, but it’s also what they do for us. There’s a relationship between our own healing and the healing of young people.”