TRAUMA AND THE CITY: The New Nonprofit Grift

We live in trauma-infused times, but it’s hard to know which came first, the disease or the diagnosis. In 1994, in New Haven, Connecticut, a science reporter named Daniel Goleman proposed a solution that seemed tailor-made to exacerbate the problem.

As Americans moved around more and traditional communities eroded, he argued, school was “the one place communities can turn to for correctives to children’s deficiencies” using “tensions and trauma of children’s lives.” These traumas and tensions, he said, were everywhere, since “the same circuitry that can be seen so boldly imprinting traumatic memories is…at work in…the more ordinary travails of childhood, such as being chronically ignored…or social rejection.”Soon after, Goleman founded a nonprofit to promote what he called “Social Emotional Learning” (SEL) with backing from Yale University and funding from philanthropic foundations. Thanks to their support, his extremely expansive vision of trauma has spread through the school system and then outside it, into the heart of communities as far away from New Haven as St. Louis, Missouri—a city I called home.

Whether Goleman’s vision is treating trauma or generating it isn’t clear.

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