C.O.R.E. Institute for Healing the Helping Professions

The Helping Professions – from education, to healthcare, to nonprofits – are in the midst of a crisis. Throughout the pandemic, this workforce demonstrated heroic levels of innovation, adaptability, and resilience in the face of once-in-a-lifetime challenges. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the systems and policies that manage their work. 

This dissonance is not a new phenomenon. Dr. Linda Lausell Bryant calls it “the dangerous paradox in human services”: we speak about our noble values—recognizing people’s strengths, a commitment to social justice, pushing for greater access and equity in services—and yet struggle to match these values to our professional systems and work lives. The weight of this paradox, when combined with the events of the last two years, are causing the human services sector to buckle. A recent national poll found that the potential exists to see over half of the teaching workforce turn over before the end of 2023 (Education Week).

The challenges of greatest interest to the CORE Institute and our partners are ones that tackle the “dangerous paradox” in organizational systems – where a disconnect exists between values and practices. While helping professionals often find ways to honor their cause in direct practice with clients and community members, it can be painfully challenging to live out these same values with one another as professionals in the systems that organize their work. 

Some examples of the challenges that CORE Institute cohorts might focus on include (but are not limited to):

• Recognizing professionals and organizational strengths;
• Creating supportive connections with colleagues;
• Building brave professional learning spaces;
• Communicating about challenges and honoring different perspectives;
• Promoting collaboration and community-building through shared work; and 
• Supporting the growth of colleagues through a strengths-based lens.

In times of great turmoil and pain within the helping professions, TIS models have been a tried and true strategy for promoting resilience. In a post-2020 context, however, TIS approaches are being understood as incomplete – they often pathologize trauma rather than foster wellbeing, and were not designed to engage collective adversities or root causes (Ginwright). The shared challenges of this moment are begging us to go beyond current systems and ways of operating, and CORE is hoping to co-create a new paradigm of healing that addresses these critical gaps with our partners. 

The CORE Model is meant to operationalize a parallel process approach with practitioners across the helping professions. This work tackles challenges impacting helping professionals by addressing gaps between organizational values and practices through the three phases: 

1. “Know Your Power” – identify and celebrate existing strengths within a partner’s program model
2. “Target Your Pain” – articulate and explore challenges manifesting in the professional context
3. “Live Your Purpose” – imagine and operationalize ways to bring the program strengths to bear against professional challenges, creating more value aligned systems and supports

The approach draws the answers to challenges from within, strengthening organizational culture (and community across the sector)

The CORE Institute works with theme-based leadership cohorts through a trainer-of-trainers approach that provides coaching and tailored support to organizational leaders as they implement their own unique programming with their professional teams. Each uniquely-designed program will leverage experiential learning modalities, invite practitioners to share their experiences and insights through an online community platform, and result in new strategies to better internalize program successes in professional systems – tackling the “dangerous paradox” and narrowing their organizational value gap. 

The CORE Institute is designed to both deepen and scale this work across the sector, offering multiple entry points (and levels of intensity) for professionals with different backgrounds to connect both synchronously and asynchronously to learn from one another and build community.

The evidence-based methods employed through the CORE Institute will, over time, result in the very outcomes needed to stem the current crisis in the Helping Professions, with increases in:

• Professional motivation, job satisfaction and retention;
• Effective delivery and quality of services;
• Client satisfaction and outcomes from services; and
• Overall organizational performance.