Shenandoah Chefalo's Blog

A first-person reflection on ACEs, wholeness, and why trauma-informed, human-centered leadership matters—plus five leaderexperiments you can run this month.

There will be signs—before change, before courage, before repair. Here’s how to read them (and what to do this week).

Build a resilient, people-centered culture through continual learning. Use these practical strategies for turning setbacks into growth opportunities daily.

Building authentic, people-first cultures creates a competitive business advantage. Embracing diverse perspectives and fair treatment of both staff and clients. This promotes creativity, effective problem-solving, and retention.

Building authentic, people-first cultures creates a competitive business advantage. Embracing diverse perspectives and fair treatment of both staff and clients. This promotes creativity, effective problem-solving, and retention.

Learn how to build genuine collaboration in your workplace through trust, inclusive decision-making, and shared accountability for innovation and lasting success.

Through words, actions, and choices, you’re constantly communicating. Honest communication is a skill and a choice, and requires courage to share difficult truths, admit mistakes, and create space for hard conversations. When organizations embrace honest communication, trust builds, problems get solved faster, and people focus on work instead of managing anxiety of the unknown.

No other element of a people-first culture can exist without safety, and safety can’t be achieved without respect for our differences.

No single person or organization “owns” trauma-informed principles. Understanding the history of how these principles evolved empowers us to continue their development ourselves.

In Western culture, we often treat mental health and physical health separately, when in fact, they are inextricable. Emotions such as hate, anger, love, and hope are whole-body experiences.Here, we explore how trauma perpetuates this disconnection, examine how our bodies influence our mental states (and vice versa), and offer practical strategies for rebuilding body awareness.