Future Here Now: The whole human matters
🌍 This is a selection from Future Here Now, a newsletter that helps you understand and get ready for a Future — in our businesses, our communities, and ourselves — that will look very different from what we’ve learned.
📰 Each newsletter includes three articles and commentaries, and periodic access to other resources, like the Future Ready Guided Journal, coming out later this month.
👉 Learn more at wiseeconomy.substack.com
💔 For several years, I served as an informal surrogate mom for a young man who had experienced massive trauma — physical abuse, sexual abuse, lack of health care, homelessness, and more.🧠 He scored a 9 out of 10 on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. One of the things that stunned me was how his traumas blocked his ability to solve problems, make decisions, or plan ahead.🌫️ It was as though his vision was fogged in — unable to believe that anything good could exist beyond it.
👧🏽 This article focuses on refugee children and teens, but the lessons apply to all of us. 🌪️ Whether escaping Afghanistan’s totalitarians, Haiti’s gang violence, or North Carolina’s natural disasters, many who come to our communities carry the baggage of dislocation, loss, and fear.
🧬 Over the past decade, we’ve learned how deeply trauma rewires the brain — changing how we handle stress, problem-solve, and even how our genes express inherited trauma across generations.
💼 Helping people heal isn’t just a mental health issue — it’s an economic and organizational imperative.In the past, we could afford to see it as Someone Else’s Problem, because work relied mostly on hands and backs, not creative and strategic minds.⚙️ But today, when success depends on collaboration, innovation, and complex thinking, unaddressed trauma becomes a hidden performance barrier.
🔥 As climate disasters and global dislocation rise, more of our most talented employees will carry unimaginable burdens. What makes us think our companies can thrive if we’re not ready to help them overcome those barriers?
💡 Supporting that young man didn’t take anything extraordinary: ✨ Encouragement. ✨ Teaching decision-making skills. ✨ Reinforcing his intrinsic worth. ✨ Sharing some of our space and resources when he needed it.
🌱 He’s made an incredible recovery, and I’m proud as hell of who he’s become.
💬 It doesn’t take much — only the willingness to toss out old assumptions about how people should be, and how our organizations should work.
🚀 As we look toward the future, thriving communities and businesses will be built by those who recognize: This is not Someone Else’s Job. 💪 It’s ours.
It’s very much our job now.
