Once a maligned group, they are now rewriting the script for themselves and for their community.“We are seeing deep changes with our youth communities,” says “Young people are shifting from a place of hopelessness and feeling like they have to leave the community to be successful to having ownership in creating a healthier community.They are engaged and are working towards improving systems and policies that affect their lives. "Empathy requires humility because we have to put our own world-view aside, and be open to the world-views of other. But in an area where young people can struggle with education and employment opportunities it creates both. When filmmaker George Lucas wanted a setting for the forest scenes in The indigenous peoples of this area have formed their own complex narratives in the place they have occupied since the beginning of time. Deeply listening, without judgement, to a wide range of people, helped us move towards new and powerful insights.” Wiki calls those empathy-sparked insights “the heart piece.”“Once they were paired with the quantitative social and health data (the numbers piece) that’s when a real change owned by the entire community- began to catch fire.”The intent was clear: to build capability and provide tools to enable members of the community to gain deep insights and shared understanding about the needs, aspirations and lives of their neighbours.“Traditional engagement methods in this kind of area have centred around big public meetings,” says ThinkPlace’s Leslie Tergas.“Say you were trying for an intervention around literacy, experts would show up and summon people from the community. The students have become the teachers.“Rather than creating a new project for them, based on their needs we are simply helping to coach them through the process as they do it themselves,” Tergas says. The 42 CFR Part 2 regulations (Part 2) serve to protect patient records created by federally assisted programs for the treatment of substance use disorders (SUD). That, in itself, is powerful.The driver for much of the improvement across Del Norte has been young people. We look for the meaning behind the numbers and the data to better understand the lived experience of people closest to the pain.”It begins by spending plenty of time in and with the community, building their capability and understanding of the design process. Ukiyo-e, or pictures of the “floating world” (ukiyo) of Edo’s licensed brothel and theater districts, took contemporaneity as their chief subject. Hier sollte eine Beschreibung angezeigt werden, diese Seite lässt dies jedoch nicht zu. People would talk and talk, advocating for their already-entrenched view. This is Part 2 of our deep dive case study into the remarkable transformation of Del Norte County and the role of empathy in creating it. It is a tight-knit place where relationships are intertwined. Done well, empathy conversations spark connection, and an aha that is highly energising for anyone who is working on community transformation. But also: What changes do we need to see so that things are different? And nobody would be making anything.”Not only had this model proven unsuccessful, Tergas says, it had generated serious fatigue.Building Healthy Communities is a series of linked projects, Tergas says. That can mean it is hard for people to imagine that they might not understand what their neighbors are experiencing.When we launched empathy interviews- many people weren’t prepared for the new stories of living in Del Norte they heard from their neighbors, especially people of different races, incomes and generations.“Our partners kept saying, ‘I’ve lived here my whole life, I thought I knew this place and I didn’t”, said “We had intentional conversations with the teen mom staying on grandpa’s couch on the reservation, the young dad just released from jail for shoving his partner while on meth, as well as the highly educated parents creating a nature-based home-school model and living off-grid. But underpinning all of that is the goal of getting an entire community to work differently.“For us this has become less about designing the change and more about activating an entire community of changemakers.”Building capability as a first step elevates everybody. For them, this has long been a bountiful source of physical, spiritual and communal nourishment. Find Part 1 HERE When filmmaker George Lucas wanted a setting for the forest scenes in StarWars: Return of the Jedi he chose the stunning green glades of the Redwood forests of Northern California, this is where we find DelNorte and Adjacent But for others, these are the forests where a motivated resistance joined together to take on and defeat a seemingly-indomitable foe.In the movie, success was forged through shared purpose, collaboration and commitment. For change-makers and service providers, empathy is key to seeing the reality of what support and change people need, in terms that are relevant to them. Part 2 has been revised to further facilitate better coordination of care in response to the opioid epidemic while maintaining its confidentiality protections against unauthorized disclosure and use.To sign up for updates or to access your subscriber preferences, please enter your contact information below.Note: All HHS press releases, fact sheets and other news materials are available at We mean having an appreciation for the life and experiences of people, especially when people have different histories, experiences and values than your own. Empathy ignites a spark that fuels the transformation work, which is fundamentally hard. ThinkPlace designers started out by running a bootcamp in Del Norte, training around 40 people from community organisations, service providers and associated groups in design thinking and insight-gathering methods.This process supercharged the empathy-sparking process, equipping people with the tools to generate human connection as they ventured out to their neighbours, asking about their lives, their hopes and the forces that constrained them.We asked them about their aspirations for their community.