Building Resilience in Crisis

2 – 9 April 2020 MONTECITO JOURNAL42 “Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” – Abraham Lincoln A HA! equips teenagers, educators, and parents with social and emotional intelligence to dismantle apathy, prevent despair, and interrupt hate-based behavior. The organization prides itself on a program based on mindfulness, awareness, connection, empathy, and resilience.

Resilience certainly is something we all need and can use in this time of crisis. The teenage years for many kids feels like a crisis, so paradoxically the youngest of us are no strangers to the feelings of worry, helplessness, and fear washing over all of us. Jennifer Freed, PhD. and Rendy Freedman, MFT, co-founded the nonprofit in 1999 in response to the Columbine High School massacre that shook the world of security, safety, and school life. AHA! stands for Attitude Harmony and Achievement. Together with a group of friends, they ran a summer program for local teens to develop relational skills through group process and the creative arts. That program has evolved into a powerhouse organization that has trained over 2,000 educators, taught over 25,000 students, and supported over 2,500 parents in their daily lives. There’s no question AHA! is rising to address kids and families’ concerns in this ever-evolving moment when resilience is what we’re all looking for. Q. Can you explain how AHA! is addressing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic here in Santa Barbara? A. We really rallied in the face of the coronavirus and the request for everybody to shelter in place. Mental health is going to be the biggest struggle in our community right now, aside from physical distancing. We’ve renamed it physical distancing instead of social distancing because the last thing we need now is to be emotionally distant. People need connection more than ever. So we’re just operating with physical distancing rules but maintaining the closeness.

How big is your group? There’s Rendy Freedman who cofounded our organization and me and 25 staff members. Unlike many nonprofits that we’ve heard of who have laid people off, we’re keeping everyone employed. Every single person is going to be paid what we promised them, at least through the summer.

That’s impressive. We planned for a disaster. That’s the kind of planning we’ve done for 20 years. We’ve been here a long time Hate is a luxury we don’t have right now. and we budgeted for disaster. The last thing that people need when they are social service providers already on shoestring salaries is to be laid off. And many, many of our colleagues in the social service sector have been given two weeks’ notice. So now we are keeping everybody employed and they are working harder than ever because they are helping through Zoom. We’ve got therapists on staff who were already seeing some of the teens and they’re continuing to see them on Zoom. We have people every single day responding to emails and phone calls, because if ever there was a time for social and emotional intelligence, it’s now. Again, the last thing we need is for people to feel socially isolated and alone emotionally. We need to all do things calmly instead of out of fear. We’re actually increasing our services versus decreasing them. So, what’s in the AHA! program now during this crisis?

We operationalized all our afterschool groups on Zoom and we created the opportunity for junior high teens and high school teens that need support to contact us through our website to form new drop-in Zoom support groups. In addition, on our Instagram account, which is @aha_sb, by Mitchell Kriegman and Nicholas Schou Budgeting for Disaster Allowed AHA! To Continue Mission we are posting three to five educational and inspirational videos every day for parents, educators, teens, and children so that people can stay very connected to one another but also get little mini lessons throughout the day and reminders on self-care. We are still serving Carpinteria afterschool and also some of the junior high peacebuilder clubs by Zoom.

How’s the staff holding up? When something like this happens, everybody goes to their reptilian brain more often than their logic brain. We have to keep calming ourselves using every tool we’ve ever learned and stay centered and grateful instead of fearful and resentful. We’re holding two support groups for our staff weekly because they’re on the front lines. We’re supporting them while they support the community. And that’s going very well.

AHA! is constantly dealing with families and community; do you have a message beyond teens to all of us?

I think the most important message I have for the community is how important it is to support the supporters. It’s really important that we have community support. The last thing that we need right now is people self-isolating while also thinking that they are the only ones feeling as bad as they feel and as scared as they feel and as sad as they feel. We’re all in this together.

We might all be reverting to our teenage selves at this moment.

Exactly, yes! Many of us are doing some very low level coping behaviors like binge watching TV, eating too much, not exercising. I think what AHA! is doing is asking everybody to be healthier than they’ve ever been psychologically and physically to see us all through this.

Teens have a unique relationship to technology that others don’t have. Is that helping them right now?

Yes, it certainly helps them in these Zoom groups. They’re pros. I think where it doesn’t help them is in their sedentary behavior. What absolutely everyone has to do is get out and do a lot of physical exercise in nature. Physical distancing, but to go outside so that they are not just machinebound their whole day.

Are you still seeing social shaming and all of that negative behavior that happens during normal times?

It’s actually gone way, way down. I think having a real emergency makes us reprioritize. Hate is a luxury we don’t have right now. People are all in survival mode. Other than the hoarding behavior and the selfish behavior that happens around the grocery store, I’ve seen a real reduction on hating in my feed. Also. I’ve been on a number of Zoom calls in the background with the teens and I’ve never seen such vulnerable sweetness in my life. The teens are reaching out to each other. The group’s Zoom-enhanced social solidarity program in practice Teens helping teens during a crisis AHA!’s Dr. Jennifer Freed

We have to keep calming ourselves using every tool we’ve ever learned and stay centered and grateful instead of fearful and resentful.

Are there lessons for adults from the teens and how they’re behaving that they could learn from?

Yes, definitely. That’s where I would say go to our Instagram account, @ aha_sb. You’ll get the culture of AHA!, because all of our staff are making videos. I think adults should go there, too. They’ll see and feel what our culture really is and what the teens have been exposed to.

Is my business in the right place?

One of our teens said on Zoom, “I can’t believe we’re making history right now.”

That’s the part that is very difficult to think about. There are many twenty-yearolds, thirty-year-olds who just can’t possibly sustain life in this kind of economy. You know, we spent how many billions and trillions bailing out the banks, it’s time to bail out the American people and that’s the investment that we need to make right now. We need to rebuild this generation with a commitment to serve everybody. We have to take the same kind of courage and boldness to bail out people on the brink of bankruptcy that we do with corporations. Since corporations are individuals and individuals are individuals now we need to say to all of these people that have lost their work: You will be personally bailed out for the next three months as long as this lasts, and then you can be on a repayment plan that’s quite generous like the banks get.

Do you ever wonder about the world we’ve given our kids? We had time to grow. Now kids seem to live faster compressed lives with less understanding and less room. Whenever I hear anybody bashing kids, it’s like, what are you talking about?

Absolutely. I think one of the things that’s incumbent on us to do now as adults is model how one gets through this. As one of our teens said on Zoom, “I can’t believe we’re making history right now.” They haven’t lived through the Spanish Flu or the Great Depression or Nazi Germany. They’re aware now that this is their big World War Two moment. It’s a war with a virus and an economy that’s collapsing, and they know the gravity of this. Many of our teens that we serve come from service-class families and many of them are just terrified because their parents have all lost their jobs and they have no idea how they’re going to be able to survive this. •MJ

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2 – 9 April 2020 MONTECITO JOURNAL44 “Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” – Omar Khayyam tomatically. Somewhere between 50% and as much as 86% of cases are asymptomatic and they are contagious during that phase.

Every day there’s something that makes your head spin. Today it’s that if you’re asymptomatic, your breath still sheds virus which is one of the reasons for six feet distancing. Is that the case?

Yes, it’s possible based on what we know. But it’s really important that the public understand the priorities. I keep coming back to two things: principles and priorities. We have to assume that everyone is infected. We have to assume that every surface is contaminated but because we do not have endless amounts of time and attention there are certain risk factors that are important to pay attention to and evidence based best practices. We don’t want people doing crazy stuff that will either be a waste of their time or just isn’t proven. How to Take Care of Yourself

So, what do you consider highest priority best practices?

I’ve outlined the basic hierarchy of what’s important to do and then what’s nice to do on flattenthecurve. com. Number one is stay home and wash your hands. Number two is don’t touch your face. Number three is disinfect, especially high touch surfaces, things like doorknobs, light switches, toilet handles, faucet handles. Number four is stay healthy and out of harm’s way. That’s a big one actually because the fewer people we have trying free-fall bungee jumping for the first time, the more capacity our health system has to treat people. Number five is protect yourself when you’re out of the house. So that means not touching things that you don’t actually mean to touch like handrails and in grocery stores commit to buying, don’t randomly smear your fingers all over all things and look at the calorie count, just buy it and get out. What about delivered packages or your groceries when you bring them home?

If you’re at risk and you want to be super safe, isolate packages three to nine days before unpacking. Put on your winter gloves, take that package, put it in a secure location, date the package and let it sit. This is a virus that has only been 136 days on this planet. This particular variant of the virus is completely brand new. That’s one reason it’s a problem. There’s a lot we don’t know right now. We know that it can survive up to three days under ideal conditions on hard surfaces and evidence from other coronaviruses suggest that what’s called fomite transmission is possible. [NOTE: “fomite transmission” refers to the transmission of infectious diseases by objects] What that means is that it can survive prolonged periods on hair, skin cells and soft fibers. The longer you leave your packages, the safer they are.

How can you be sure you’ve cleaned everything?

You’ve got to protect yourself without spending eight hours a day in a lot of anxiety. Decontaminating things is really hard, and hard to do well if you’re not someone who’s been through that training. So, keep it simple. Even something like getting your gloves off without, touching the outside of the glove requires training and practice. So, if you’re not comfortable doing that, if you’re not practiced, put on a pair of winter gloves that are easier to get on and off without touching the outside and just pop those in the washing machine after use. A normal wash and dry cycle will perfectly kill the virus.

We’ve seen videos of how to unpack your groceries that have shown that the issue is the wrapping. Not the food.

Exactly it is the wrapping and not the food, but people who aren’t accustomed to doing it well, can put themselves at unnecessary risk. If you buy six boxes of pasta, are you going to need all six boxes within three days? I have a grocery guide on the website that I put together. One hint is that when you are at the checkout, separate the things you know can sit from those that cannot and be lazy about it. Stuff the rest in a corner and deal with it when you absolutely must.

Can’t we use disinfectants and sterilizers on the package and somehow dump the internals of the package without touching the outside?

I would just caution you that you should use that as a plan B, rather than a plan A.

What about something simple like apples. Can you clean them with vinegar and water and a little bit of lemon?

Yes. However, vinegar won’t cut it. It doesn’t have a high enough, acidity or alcohol content to actually break the lipid layer, the fat that protects the virus. But it’s pretty simple. You just scrub them, wash them in cool water with a little vegetable brush. Soap and water should only be used for foods that have a thick peel, like orange or bananas and everything should always be well rinsed. It’s way too complicated for something like fresh berries, lettuce, herbs, if they’ve been handpicked recently. Everything frozen like berries are fine because those were picked in time before the pandemic got going.

What about riding your bike to the ocean for exercise or taking a walk? What about exercising outdoors at a safe distance?

I absolutely encourage people to be outdoors as much as they can. That’s not to say they should be packed on beaches. But staying in nature is going to help keep us sane. Most people in Santa Barbara have very small houses. They can’t stay holed up in their houses and tiny little backyards or patios for weeks. It’s not sustainable. So yes, absolutely get out into nature. If you are not actually touching, is it zero risk? No, there is no such thing as zero risk. However, the risk that people go crazy, is higher if they are in their house for an extended period of time. This is not going to be over in a week and it’s not going to be over in two weeks. We have to really pace ourselves in order to do this well. We don’t want people doing crazy stuff that will either be a waste of their time or just isn’t proven. What are the biggest misconceptions that are out there right now?

That’s a good question. So, number one as I said in the beginning, is thinking I’m too young and healthy, I’m not at risk. Number two, it’s like the flu, it’s vastly more deadly. Number three would be, that this is overblown, there are no infections near me. The “Don’t Test, Don’t Tell” policy has given the public a false sense of security in the face of an already raging epidemic. Number four is the economy is more important. If a tsunami was coming towards your town, would you complain about the economic cost of evacuating? This outbreak is an invisible tsunami. What About the Emotional Toll?

Some people are simply paralyzed and terrified by so much happening so quickly, they don’t know how to emotionally deal with it.

For many people this is the first time that they’ve come to grips with their own mortality. People have different timelines for that. People should use this opportunity as an invitation to look at what’s really important to them. It’s important that people take personal responsibility for themselves and for their community to do everything. Don’t be a vector.

Do you have any thoughts on the way the federal government has handled the crisis so far?

We have fewer than 1% of the masks that we would need to do this. Everybody’s going to need these things. This should be nonpartisan. We have to think about the greater good. People should be helped on the basis of need, not the basis of greed. If we don’t use this opportunity to find higher ground with people across the aisle, we will lose this game for us and for our children. •MJ JM EXPLAINS (Continued from page 13)

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