A year-long series featuring Detroiters who are driving positive change in their communities.
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Sirrita Darby, Executive Director, Detroit Heals Detroit This high school educator has dedicated her career to helping Detroit youths confront and heal trauma.
M ost psychologists will agree that a great deal of the baggage we carry around as adults stems from improperly healed trauma in our childhoods. And when that child is Black and existing below the poverty line, the would-be bumps and bruises of normal adolescence can turn malignant if we don’t catch the problem early. It’s why educator Sirrita Darby heads Detroit Heals Detroit, an organization developed 6 BLAC • JUNE 2020 • BLACdetroit.com
by Detroit high school students that creates a space in which they can support and guide one other toward dealing with and healing trauma. Whether it’s race-based stress, the threat of community violence, or, lately, COVID-related strain, the youths prop up and lean on one another through healing circles, mental health check-ins and the like. Formed in 2018 as an expan-
sion of a class project Darby facilitated with her students at Detroit Collegiate Preparatory High School, the buzz has since carried to other schools and throughout the community. They’d been holding twice-monthly healing circles during which the students would sit together and talk – or just listen to others – and support the navigating of illness, grief, loss and other life challenges. But, Darby says, “We
had to adapt to COVID.” Physical healing circles have evolved to virtual meetings, and they’ve developed the COVID-19 Detroit Youth Taskforce to specifically address the difficulties brought on by this crisis, like the loss of school as a refuge to those whose homes may be unhealthy. Darby says Detroit Heals Detroit encourages the students to speak and write about their trauma. “It’s
