ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For two decades, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky has been working with trauma survivors. After regularly spending nights volunteering in a homeless shelter at age 18, she went on to work with survivors of child abuse, domestic violence, acute trauma and natural disasters. Also active in community organizing and social-justice movements, she has acquired an intimate knowledge of the toll that trauma can take on those who are called to help.

With her theory of Trauma Stewardship she combines the age-old wisdom of traditions from around the globe with the most cutting-edge contemporary research, inviting those of us who have been exposed to hardship, suffering, or trauma, whether directly or indirectly, to reinvent how we approach caring for others and ourselves.

She has shared her practice of Trauma Stewardship through workshops and gatherings, traveling across North America and around the world to bring this work to a dizzyingly broad array of workers—from community organizers and health care workers in Japan to zookeepers and reconstruction volunteers in the post Katrina New Orleans, from U.S. Airforce pilots to Canadian fire fighters, from public school teachers to private practice doctors. Over and over, she was asked to write this book.

Laura continues her work with Trauma Stewardship, collaborating with others to develop sustainable work practices and maintaining a private counseling practice for individuals. She is also the founder and director of a Spanish-language preschool and grade school enrichment program that offers an environmental and social-justice curriculum.

ABOUT THE COAUTHOR

Connie Burk started her work in the anti-violence movement twenty years ago in Lawrence, Kansas. As a student activist and then a domestic violence shelter advocate, she began to make sense of her own experience with family violence and to build a framework for engaging people to make change. As her work progressed, she co-founded the first regional domestic violence survivor services for lesbian, bisexual, trans and gay people in Kansas as a project of Women’s Transitional Care Services.

Since 1997, she has directed The Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse in Seattle, WA. With her leadership, The Northwest Network has developed a nationally acclaimed assessment tool, cutting edge analysis regarding survivors’ use of violence, and innovative strategies for working with survivors’ friends and families.Over the years, colleagues and allies from across Northwest region and the country have embraced Connie’s re-frame of the work: not just to end domestic violence but to create the conditions necessary to support loving and equitable relationships. www.nwnetwork.org

Connie trains internationally on transforming abuse in LBTG communities, integrating community engagement throughout programs, sustaining a practice of ethical advocacy, and taking the crisis out of crisis response organizations. She has focused particular attention on strengthening alliances among marginalized communities while centering liberation values in her work. She is currently working with FaithTrust Institute on a national consultation to engage LBTG affirming congregations and clergy. She is a charter member of the Violence Against Women Act's STOP Grants' Technical Assistance National Advisory Board on Marginalized Communities, a past Board Chair of the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic
Violence and serves on the Jewish Women’s International Conference on Domestic Violence Advisory Committee.

Active in her community and synagogue, Connie is an Executive Producer of the documentary film, Worlds Apart, and her sermon, Yom Kippur 5766, was recently published in the Journal of Religion and Abuse.