Resilience Writing Project

October 17, 2021

The Resilience Writing Project teaches evidence-based workshops on the benefits of expressive writing to healthcare professionals so that they can process the traumas they experience while caring for others, build resilience and positive affect, and, ultimately, share the salubrious gift of expressive writing with colleagues and patients.

Background

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Leonard Grant created The Resilience Writing Project to help mental health workers and allied professionals affiliated with the Onondaga Community Trauma Task Force (OCTTF) process traumas with expressive writing. Expressive writing focuses on the emotions we carry about experiences and people that have affected us. Decades of peer-reviewed research have demonstrated that writing about the things that trouble us can provide insights, create meanings, and promote healing.

Dr. Grant, an assistant professor of writing at Syracuse University and member of OCTTF’s executive board, first encountered the transformative power of expressive writing while facilitating a summer writing workshop for the JCC Metrowest (NJ) in 2012. Participants (Jewish widows aged 72-96 years old) reported that writing about their lived experiences improved their mental, emotional, and physical health. Since then, Dr. Grant has researched the relationship between writing, trauma, and wellness.

Dr. Grant joined the OCTTF in 2017 as a researcher and concerned citizen seeking to bridge gaps in mental health care in Syracuse, NY, one of America’s poorest cities. With the OCTTF, Grant conducted a needs assessment of more than 25 human services agencies and local institutions. Stakeholders uniformly agreed that Syracuse and Onondaga County required a community trauma response team to support survivors of mass traumas 24-72 hours following the catastrophic event. On April 12, 2021, OCTTF launched the Post-Trauma Response Team (PTRT) with skilled volunteers from local hospitals, human services agencies. PTRT is a free service activated through the county’s 211 and 911 systems. After proving PTRT’s viability and efficacy, OCTTF partnered with Huntington Family Centers in Syracuse to manage PTRT’s day-to-day operations.

In June 2021, The Resilience Writing Project was initially conceived as a wellness service for PTRT volunteers to process secondary trauma associated with helping community members in distress. In October 2021, Upstate University Hospital’s Social Work Department contacted Dr. Grant to facilitate an expressive writing workshop via Zoom for its social workers, who were experiencing distress from working through the pandemic. The Resilience Writing Workshop was immediately popular with Upstate’s social workers. Over the next 16 months, Dr. Grant facilitated monthly workshops for Upstate’s Social Work, Transitional Care, Nursing, and Neurology Departments.

Demand for the Resilience Writing Workshop continued after the pandemic. To date, Dr. Grant has facilitated more than 50 workshops for over 30 other institutions and human services agencies in Onondaga County and across the United States, including:

Syracuse University’s Barnes Center Mental Health Counselors

LeMoyne College’s Physician Assistant Program

Upstate Medical University Medical School

American Red Cross

Hospice of Central New York and Finger Lakes

Syracuse City School District (NY)

Sage Alliance Therapeutic School (Rochelle Park, NJ)

Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Onondaga, Cayuga, and Madison Counties (NY)

Health Humanities Consortium, Creighton University Medical School (Phoenix, AZ)

Catholic Medical Association (Orlando, FL)

He has also consulted with GLOBSEC’s Kyiv Post-Trauma Response Task Force to guide Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry in developing treatments for soldiers and civilians suffering from psychological trauma from the ongoing war with Russia. (You can read the white paper here.)

Over the years, Dr. Grant has developed a robust curriculum on expressive writing, with over 20 modules on topics ranging from processing trauma, gratitude, forgiveness, job satisfaction, goal setting, mindfulness, spirituality, and prayer. He addresses these topics with genres including, narrative storytelling, poetry, playwriting, and parallel charting.

In Fall 2023, he taught a course at Syracuse University called WRT 118: Writing for a Better You to teach undergraduate students the evidenced-based wellness benefits of expressive writing.

Syracuse University has generously funded an online version of the Virtual Resilience Writing Project for psychoeducation and research. This project is currently under development with faculty in Syracuse University’s School of Social Work. Additionally, he is currently writing a scholarly monograph about community-based trauma and expressive writing interventions.

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