History

How can our best be brought out in a crisis?  How can our creativity be unlocked, even when we are under great pressure?  How do we build hope, resiliency, and united communities when crisis presents us with hopelessness, fear, and isolation?  Can the everyday challenges of life and even crisis be used to uplift and unite us?  Yes!  There are time tested methods to accomplish these things.  The Unity Project was created to empower young people to unlock their resilient strengths to work together to build and sustain united and diverse communities.

“I’ve been working with traumatized populations since the 1980’s,” says Dr. John Woodall, the Founder and Director of the Unity Project and a psychiatrist at Harvard University.  “What has struck me over the years is just how much strength people bring to the most difficult situations.  What if we focused our attention on bringing out these strengths instead of just focusing on problems?  For example, if you want to get rid of a shadow, you shine a light on it.  You don’t just talk about how much the shadow bothers you.  Similarly, if you want to deal with a challenge in your life, you need to focus on the strengths that will help you deal with the problem.”

Dr. Woodall has worked with severely traumatized populations: war veterans, abused children, victims of violence, refugees, and the severely mentally ill and for nearly a year coordinated a trauma training program sponsored by the US State Department through the Harvard School of Public Health for professionals in the Balkans after the war there.  In this work, he saw the remarkable resilience that people are capable of, even in desperate situations.   He became convinced that, as helpful as mental health interventions might be, these approaches usually missed the profound strengths that people demonstrate in crisis. He observed that the scope of issues people face in crisis is usually beyond what the mental health model or the health care system can deal with.  An approach was needed that took into account the whole person, their communities, and the institutions within their communities.  Over the past few decades, Dr Woodall evolved a more inclusive vision about how to unite around our shared human dignity and rebuild and transform our personal lives and communities using resilient strengths. 

“When I returned from my work in the Balkans, I knew that a dramatically new approach was needed if we were ever going to be able to meet the needs of larger societies after a major crisis.  Also, no one was talking about how to develop the strengths of kids to help them in the day to day challenges they face, let alone the enormous challenges of something like 9/11.  So, the Unity Project was born to meet this need.” 

Meanwhile, at Harvard University, Dr. Woodall established the “Resilient Responses to Social Crisis Interfaculty Working Group,” to look at integrated and multidisciplinary ways to build resilient strengths in kids.  He piloted the work in training efforts in the Middle East between Palestinian and Israelis.  The Unity Project benefited from the insights of all these experiences.

Using its resilience based model, the Unity Project was called upon in 2002 by the Department of Youth and Community Development of the City of New York to design programs to build resilience in youth across the city after 9/11.  The “Healing Arts Project” was the result.  The School Arts Rescue Committee in New York then asked the Unity Project to provide arts based resilience training to teaching artists throughout the city and state.  Then, after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the US Gulf Coast, the Unity Project was asked to provide training to teachers there on building resilience in students.  Now, with cutting edge methods backed up by years of field experience in the Balkans, the Middle East, New York and the US Gulf Coast the Unity Project has partnered with large national youth networks to provide world class programming to prepare our young people to be resilient leaders in the global community.