From Harm to Healing: Five Takeaways from Our Community Meeting with Lauren Trout

What happens when instead of becoming defensive in situations where harm has been caused, we hold ourselves accountable?

At our January Community Meeting, Senior Program Associate with WestEd’s Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities team, Lauren Trout, invited us to explore how accountability is essential to help us move beyond blame to foster forgiveness, healing, and repair.

Together we discussed the importance of understanding the root causes of harm, the need for genuine apologies, and finding the empathy to separate the person from the action to support new narratives and stronger relationships in schools and communities.

Here are five key takeaways.

Taking accountability isn’t just apologizing for harm done, it means changing the behavior and growing from the experience so patterns don’t repeat themselves.

The heart of this work is really this idea that we belong to each other, right? We need each other to do more than just survive out here. And no one is disposable. And in a restorative worldview, accountability isn’t a destination that we get to or this one time event. Like I did it, and now I said it, and now it’s over, and I move on. It’s ultimately a lifelong practice, because we are in relationship to each other always. And so restorative justice would say it’s a skill set of being able to recognize harm that we’ve caused, own it, and change our behavior.

Identifying behaviors, accepting harm done, looking for patterns, unlearning old behaviors, and learning new behaviors.

There’s a framework that I really like to use when I facilitate accountability and healing processes, and here in my community in New Orleans, this particular framework comes from an organization called Philly Stands Up who really breaks down accountability into five main phases. And I want to introduce them briefly. So the first step they say is about identifying behaviors. It’s to recognize our actions and their impacts, even if we had different intentions with our behavior, even if we didn’t plan to cause harm. But harm has happened. It’s a space for us to really acknowledge that that harm has occurred, and we have had a role to play in it.

Next, we acknowledge how our behavior affected others. And I think this is really a stage or a space that’s really where listening is more important than anything else. This is also the stage where empathy really gets built.

Next, it’s about looking for repeating patterns and asking what needs to change in ourselves and our environments. I think we can tend to treat incidents of harm as like one off or isolated events, and when that happens, we can easily dismiss our role in them. So a big part of this work that can get a little invisibilized is to say like, “okay, I have caused harm. That has happened. I’m understanding the impact. What are the patterns that contributed to this? What are the internal patterns? What are the external patterns?’ That didn’t just come from nowhere, right?” So it helps us get to the root and try to fix it.

To understand why harm occurs, we need to move beyond individual intent and trace it across multiple layers: individual experiences (trauma histories, skills, emotional states), interpersonal dynamics (like miscommunication and power), institutional conditions (including organizational culture, norms, policies, scarcity, resource distribution), ideological forces like oppression, and unmet needs for belonging, safety, agency, rest, and community.

When we get to unlearning old behaviors, this is where we work, to let go of harmful habits. We take the time to know our triggers and respond differently, not just in our behaviors, but with a lot of compassion for ourselves and for others. And others that are supporting us, others that have been impacted by harm and harm that we’ve caused.

What also kind of gets lost sometimes, but is equally as important, or maybe the most important, is that accountability is also about building healthier ways of connecting. It’s not about just not doing that thing again, but creating pathways for connection and new patterns and new systems of healing that promote connection. That prevents isolation. So doing this, supported by community, is really helpful, and it’s how we prevent future harm.

By fostering voluntary, non-judgmental environments for repair, taking accountability doesn’t need to feel like a punishment.

Accountability grows from connection, not coercion. And I think that’s kind of a piece too, like, when is this not going well? Some things we might explore are like, is there enough connection in place for this, for me to support meaningful accountability? Am I inadvertently making it feel to this young person that I might be being coercive, right? Empathy and healing are ultimately at the center of the process. So non-shaming, non-judgmental spaces are really, really essential.

Shame blocks accountability, and safety and honesty invite it. I think that’s a really, kind of simple but really big distinction when people are like, ‘what’s this difference between?” Or, “how do we support accountability without causing shame?”I think connection really helps safety, non-judgment, etc. I would say meaningful accountability requires a lot of visioning work and imagining work, right? Like, we can imagine that our systems could be designed where the goal of accountability wasn’t punishment but healing.

It separates people from their actions, links individual responsibility to wider social and structural harm, and invites us to build systems of repair where accountability is challenging without being fear-based—making space for new narratives, relationships, and collective healing.

The more opportunities to build and deepen relationships, the more resources there are to repair them when harm and conflict occurs. I’m going to say that again, because to me, it’s like the biggest one and the biggest resource. The deeper the relationship, or the more opportunity to build and deepen the relationship, the more the resources when harm happens.

I, as a practitioner, have learned a ton of skills over the last decade about how to support people in their accountability of an incident. But those skills, and me, and those practices—I don’t hold a candle to somebody’s best friend who can create a space for them to reflect on behavior and explore underlying patterns and identify unmet needs. I can have all these perfect activities, and if somebody’s best friend can sit and do that with them, they can go further, deeper, faster, right? So relationships, really, they’re the goal of this work, and they’re also the path by which we get to that goal.