What RISE is asking
RISE grew from years of asking a simple but difficult question:
What would it take for people and the systems around them to support healing, development, relationship, and meaningful change—not just in principle, but in practice?
That question grew from a longer inquiry into what happens when trauma-informed principles meet the real conditions of organizational life.
RISE offers a whole person–whole community–whole systems approach to trauma-integrating organizations. It is both a way of seeing and a way of working: recognizing what is happening, supporting restoration, integrating what we learn, and creating conditions for something new to emerge.
The focus is not on perfect organizations. It is on systems that can recognize adversity and harm, support healing and development, sustain relationships, learn from disruption, repair damage, adapt structures, and expand meaningful participation.
The RISE Recipe
The Recipe is a practical companion to the RISE framework: a way to recognize what is happening, examine the conditions around it, and consider what response may support restoration and integration.
It brings RISE into practice through real situations—helping us notice what is happening, ask what the conditions are making possible or difficult, and consider where restoration, integration, or change may be needed.
The Recipe is being developed through cases, writing, conversation, and the creation of tools that make the framework more useful in practice.
Where RISE came from
RISE grew out of many years of work at the intersection of adversity, trauma, resilience, systems, and organizational life.
My work with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) gave me a concrete way to make visible connections among individual experience, relationships, communities, and larger systems. Integral theory had already given me a way of seeing those dimensions together—and a way to make visible what I was seeing across perspectives that were often separated.
Over time, the questions became larger. What happens when trauma-informed principles meet the actual conditions of organizational life? What happens when an organization recognizes adversity or harm but its structures, relationships, or ways of working make restoration difficult? And what would it take to create systems that can learn, repair, adapt, and support people and relationships over time?
RISE is the framework that has grown from that continuing inquiry.
