By Sarah Willoughby, LCSW, Freeman Health System
On Sunday, Sept 7, 2025, I attended a community outreach event hosted by the Neighborhood Resilience Project in collaboration with McAuley Ministries and the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM). This was a partnership through the 2025 STFM Conference on Practice & Quality Improvement in Pittsburgh, PA.
I rode to the main site with Marisol Valentin, the director of McAuley Ministries, who told me about the sad history of the Hill District of Pittsburgh and the area’s increased poverty, violence, and other problems. Then we met Father Paul Abernathy, who had the vision to start the Neighborhood Resilience Project—a trauma-informed community development nonprofit.
He provided a tour of the medical/behavioral health facility and led a round table discussion along with one of the McAuley Ministries board members, two volunteer physicians, chief administrator, the nursing director, and the volunteer coordinator. Together, they described their work in revitalizing the Hill community—a neighborhood negatively affected by gentrification.
Father Abernathy and others realized residents of this neighborhood have experienced individual and community trauma, which is affecting their emotional and physical health. I loved their focus “to promote resilient, healing and healthy communities so that people can be healthy enough to sustain opportunities and realize their potential.” I have spent my entire career—35 years—doing this in various rural and urban areas.
During the last 15 years, the Neighborhood Resilience Project has worked with community members, leaders, volunteers, and donors to strengthen the community by focusing on three pillars:
- Community Support
- Health and Well-Being
- Leadership Development
The Neighborhood Resilience Project’s motto is to engage community members to transform them into a resilient, healing, and healthy community. Programs include a free Health Care Center, a Trauma Response Program, a Backpack Feeding Program, and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Vaccination Collaborative.
Father Abernathy was working in a predominantly black and underserved community in Pittsburgh and regularly interacting with men, women, and children who had repeatedly experienced multiple forms of trauma. He was a combat veteran of the Iraq War and realized that trauma in the form of hunger, abuse, homelessness, lack of opportunity, racism, lack of health care, and violence greatly informed the worldview and culture of the community.
Understanding that trauma was the greatest barrier facing the development of his community, Father Abernathy began to ask the question, “how do you heal an entire community that has been inundated with trauma for generations?”
Here are some of the Neighborhood Resilience Project’s recent accomplishments:
- Through 2021, the organization has helped facilitate more than 2,500 COVID-19 vaccinations, deployed more than 60 times to homicides related to gun violence, provided more than 14,000 items of food and 5,000 clothing items, provided more than $23,000 in emergency relief and document recovery, and had close to 200 volunteer hours through clinicians alone such as to provide free care to the uninsured in the region.
- The organization has hosted groups from across the nation who had been previously trained in the Trauma Informed Community Development Framework for a Summit in June 2021.
- The organization utilized “Micro-Community Interventions” in the Hill District and saw an improvement in overall well-being as analyzed by the well-being tool, “ImHealthy.”
- The organization has renovated its Free Health Center space to double in size and now offers medical and dental care.
- In partnership with the Jefferson Regional Foundation, the Neighborhood Resilience Project is rolling out work in the Mon-Valley – first by training one cohort from the McKeesport, Clairton and Duquesne neighborhoods (for a total of three cohorts) in the Trauma Informed Community Development Framework and then coaching those cohorts through the roll-out phase.
Visiting the Neighborhood Resilience Project and meeting key team members was inspiring to me personally and professionally. We’d like our community residents in the Joplin, MO, area to be healthier, and we struggle to find ways to do this. In April, we had a serious storm in our rural area, causing damage to trees, fences, homes, and sheds. Just this week, a woman whose farm is still significantly damaged and whose life has seriously been impacted told her story.
This “Trauma Informed Community Development” (TICD) model in our community might be helpful to Joplin, as many were devastated by the EF5 tornado in 2011 that killed more than 200 people. I plan to meet with someone from the Neighborhood Resilience Project in the next month and learn more about the imHealthy tool and ”micro interventions” we might be able to implement in our community.
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