It’s one thing for the Osceola County community to recognize Hope Partnership for its ongoing efforts to provide support for those experiencing homelessness and poverty.
Now other groups, like the Sanctuary Institute, recognize the effort.
Hope Partnership is now a Sanctuary Certified Organization, meaning the Institute recognizes their commitment to creating safe, inclusive, and traumainformed spaces. The Sanctuary Model focuses on creating environments that promote healing and resilience, especially for individuals who have experienced trauma. It’s built on promoting core commitments of nonviolence, emotional intelligence, social learning, social responsibility, democracy, open communication, and growth and change.
“This certification is really an opportunity for our organization to validate the core values we’ve had since our inception,” Hope Parternship CEO Rev. Mary Downey said at a gathering Monday that coincided with the weekly Hope Cares event that provides those in need of services food, clothing, showers and above all else, dignity.
“Our values are the same for every single person we work with. We believe firmly that it is not what is wrong with us, but what happened to us. When we experience different things, homelessness, domestic violence, we are all people who have experienced trauma.”
And, Downey said, that trauma does not need to define us.
“Our trauma is simply something that happened to us, but when it happened to us, it changed something in us,” she said. “It caused us to see things differently.”
And now, Hope Partnership, while working with those who need that hope, is now traumaresponsive certified, with everyone in the organization having a role in that.
“It was three or four months into it I realized there was something that worked,” said Youth Systems Guide Tony Marrero.
“We will not ignore that trauma, but that trauma will not be the end of anyone’s story,” Downey said.
It was a three-year process to receive the certification—it can take as long as five, Downey said—that’s always been a priority. And, Osceola County’s tourism-based economy gives it a unique culture from a standpoint of housing people.
“We are not defined by our experiences,” she said.
