Racial Trauma & Healing Gatherings
Heal together through engaging our past, present, and hopes for the future
Racial Trauma & Healing Gatherings invite leaders and their communities to engage the personal and collective stories that shape our lives, communities, and pathways toward healing.
Led by Linda Royster, LCMHC, MA, Strategic Alliances Manager at The Seattle School, these gatherings are designed for communities of color and create an embodied, relational space to engage stories of racialized trauma with care, honesty, and hope.
Each gathering is rooted in the local community, honoring its people, land, stories, history, and context.
Reframing Resiliency & Reclaiming Collective Wisdom through Story Engagement
Story weaves together our past, present, and future. Our personal and collective stories are deeply connected, making it impossible to engage one without engaging the other.
Stories of resilience and triumph are essential because they cultivate hope. But when they are the only stories we tell, healing remains partial and fragmentation persists.
Stories of trauma and harm also need to be spoken, held, and heard with care. Racial Trauma & Healing Gatherings offer a safer space for people within racially traumatized communities to learn, process, feel, and articulate the stories they carry.
When trauma remains unaddressed, it can reverberate through communities and generations.
Holding the Complexity of Hurt and Hope in Community
Engaging both joyful and traumatic stories can open a path toward healing, redemption, and a new narrative. Trauma is not the end of the story.
When we engage the stories we carry, we can begin to imagine healing for ourselves, our families, our communities, and generations to come.
Bring a Gathering to Your Community
Racial Trauma & Healing Gatherings are offered in communities across the country, creating intentional spaces for people to engage personal and collective stories of racialized trauma and healing.
This intentional offering moves beyond the four walls of an institution and into the places where people live, worship, gather, and build community. Each gathering is shaped around its local context and the stories that matter there.
This is a specific invitation for communities of color and individuals ready to engage the work of racialized trauma and healing together.
Hosting Requirements:
- 50+ anticipated participants preferred
- A secured in-person venue, such as a church, college, or community center
- A commitment to creating a space for embodied, relational engagement with care and intention
Interested in bringing a Racial Trauma & Healing Gathering to your community? Inquire Here
Meet Linda Royster
Linda Royster, LCMHC, MA
Strategic Alliances Manager
Linda Royster is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor in North Carolina and Strategic Alliances Manager at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. A graduate of The Seattle School, she has been part of the institution and the Allender Center since 2011 and part of a think-tank that gave rise to the idea of the center.
Her work centers on racialized trauma, story engagement, trauma care training, and healing, particularly among communities of color. She leads The Seattle School’s Racial Trauma & Healing Gatherings across the country and authored the addendum to the 25th-anniversary edition of Healing the Wounded Heart by Dr. Dan Allender.
A Commitment Beyond Our Four Walls
Racial Trauma & Healing Gatherings is part of an ongoing commitment by The Seattle School to see, know, and understand the communities beyond our four walls.
We believe formation happens in relationship and in context. That means showing up where people are, listening to the stories communities carry, and creating spaces where healing can take root. This work is one expression of that commitment.