Liz and Stephen Alderman aren’t your typical candidates to start an international nonprofit.
When the couple launched the Peter C. Alderman Foundation in 2003, they were in their early 60s — an age when many people are looking toward retirement. But for the Aldermans, any thought of winding down vanished in the smoke of the collapsing World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That morning, their 25-year-old son Peter was in the North Tower for a business conference. The last message Peter’s family received from him that morning was an email to his sister Jane at 9:35 a.m., about 35 minutes after the plane hit. “The room is filling with smoke, I’m scared,” he wrote.
Liz never learned exactly how her son died. “My hope is that he believed the fire department was coming,” Liz says. “I know he was in a very terrible place. I know there were a lot of jumpers, but I don’t know if he was alive when the building fell. I have no idea what he suffered, but I know he suffered. I only hope that he didn’t know he was about to die.”
In her deep grief after 9/11, Liz still felt a compulsion to help her son, “to do for him,” as she puts it. She felt as though a limb had been amputated, but her body didn’t really know it was gone. And she felt a deep need to do something positive. “It was this burning thing. I couldn’t define it at the time, but it was a need to do good.”
That instinct ultimately led the Aldermans to start their nonprofit, which trains health professionals in communities devastated by violence and armed conflict to deal with the aftermath of severe psychological trauma. And their affirmative response to trauma is less unusual than you might think. People who survive the worst life can throw at them are driven to ask piercing questions about their priorities and values. They need to make sense of what has happened to them and find a meaningful way forward. The answers they find inspire profound and lasting personal growth.
Interviewing dozens of people over the past few years who have gone through these transitions, I came to think of these experiences as jolts: high-voltage bolts out of the blue that transform people.
Experts who study social entrepreneurship say this response isn’t the only motivation they see in the people they have met and studied — but it occurs often.
“What I’ve noticed over the years is how prevalent the jolt impetus is,” says Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Encore.org, which helps people shift into careers focused on the common good.
Many find their way to the nonprofit world and social-change movements by starting their own organizations, going to work for other groups, or volunteering.
Jolt survivors are an important source of energy, talent, and time for the nonprofit world. In many cases, trauma has expanded their ability to empathize with others far beyond what is usual — and they feel compelled to put this empathy into action.
No Better Memorial
For Liz Alderman, the journey began one night about nine months after Peter’s death. She was up late watching ABC’s Nightline and saw a feature about the “walking wounded” — people scarred by violence and trauma in countries where mental-health services are in short supply or viewed in a negative light.
“The topic just drew me in,” Liz remembers. “There were three young Afghan children who were war orphans. I’m looking at these three bedraggled kids with no family, and I wanted to wrap them in my arms and bring them home with me. But as I was watching, I started to realize that we could do more than take in three children. The thought that came to me was, ‘We couldn’t do anything for Peter — he was killed because of terrorism — but if we could return life to people in Peter’s name who had survived something like this, there was no better memorial.’ "
That insight — and her ability to empathize with trauma victims halfway around the world — paved the way for Liz and Steve to create their nonprofit to train health professionals to deal with the aftermath of severe psychological trauma. The intent is to restore basic human function to people whose mental capacity has been damaged by extreme trauma.
It’s not easy to keep a new nonprofit going: Research by the Urban Institute shows that among organizations started in the United States from 1995 to 2000, only 45 percent are still operating; among internationally focused organizations, 63 percent have survived. The Alderman foundation looks as if it is here to stay. The Aldermans were honored with a Presidential Citizens Medal in 2011, and a Purpose Prize in 2009 for extraordinary work as social innovators. Barron’s magazine named their nonprofit one of America’s most effective small charity organizations in 2007.
The transformation of their lives has been profound. Liz and Steve had raised three children in the suburbs of New York City; Steve grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., the son of a doctor. He initially trained as a surgeon but shifted his focus to oncology during his residency. Over a 30-year career in medicine, he worked at hospitals, Columbia University, and New York University while managing a successful private practice in the suburbs. Liz was mainly a stay-at-home mom, though she taught special education to foot the bills while Steve was in medical school.
Their nonprofit work began with a clinic the foundation opened in 2005 in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Today, the Aldermans operate seven mental-health clinics in Cambodia, Uganda, and Kenya. The foundation also hosts an annual Pan-African Conference on Psychotrauma for health-care professionals, postgraduate students, university faculty, and staff members of mental-health-related nongovernmental organizations in Africa. It has provided free training to nearly 1,000 mental-health workers.
The scope of the problem in less-developed parts of the world is huge. One billion people worldwide experience disabling conditions, and 60 percent of those are linked strongly to mental, neurological, and substance-abuse conditions. Most of the people afflicted by mental-health disorders live in low- and middle-income countries, and contextual factors such as poverty, hunger, conflict, and trauma increase their vulnerability. But up to 85 percent of people with severe mental disorders don’t receive treatment because of gross underfunding of programs and services.
One consequence is shortened longevity: A study conducted of high-income countries found that afflicted men die 20 years earlier than men not afflicted; women, 15 years earlier. Human-rights violations are another consequence: People with mental disorders often experience social exclusion, stigma, and discrimination.
Turning Awareness Into Action
The Aldermans were moved to reach out on a global basis, but Lucy McBath is tackling problems closer to home.
She became a nationally known advocate for gun control following the horrifying murder of her teenage son, Jordan Davis, in one of the best-known white-on-black shootings in recent years.
In court, Jordan’s killer, Michael David Dunn, tried to justify his actions with the infamous Florida self-defense statute known as Stand Your Ground. Enacted in 2005, the statute authorizes people to protect and defend themselves against threats or perceived threats, using any level of force they judge necessary, without any duty to retreat.
Since Jordan’s murder, Lucy has transformed herself into a national leader in the fight for gun control. She established a scholarship fund in Jordan’s name, and she is working with former President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper program. Lucy is one of the “Mothers of the Movement” — a small group of mothers of black men and women who have been killed either by gun violence or in violent encounters with police officers. Along with Lucy, they include the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Dontre Hamilton.
Lucy today is a full-time staff member of Everytown for Gun Safety, one of the key national organizations fighting for gun control. Although she comes from a political family, she wasn’t much engaged in politics before Jordan’s murder. She worked most of her career as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines, and that’s how she was earning a living at the time of the shooting.
“I was always very politically aware of what was going on in the country but not really putting that awareness into action,” she told me.
Tears Don’t End
An emotional jolt changed the life of Eva Leivas-Andino. It was the realization that years earlier, she had failed to provide the support that her son Paolo needed growing up as a closeted gay teenager — a failure that had left Paolo close to suicide on several occasions.
Coming to grips with what she saw as her failures as a mother, Eva took a hard turn down a new life path far from her upbringing in a conservative Miami family of Cuban immigrants. Today, she helps run a nonprofit organization in Miami that works with teens and families on sexual orientation, gender-identity issues, and suicide prevention.
Jolt survivors have found new ways to live with a sense of balance and purpose — but that doesn’t mean their pain has been vanquished. Most don’t see themselves as heroic. Rather, they have simply moved forward with their lives, one step at a time, because that is the only choice they found available to them.
“I always thought if I lost a child, I wouldn’t be able to stop screaming,” says Liz Alderman. “But the reality is you can’t keep screaming your throat closes up; you give yourself a headache. You have two choices — either you kill yourself literally or figuratively, by crawling into bed and never getting out, or you put one foot in front of the other.”
People build new lives around the traumatic event and move on — they build a new life outside of their pain.
“The presence of growth doesn’t lead to a commensurate reduction in stress or suffering,” says Lawrence Calhoun, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a pioneering researcher in the field of post-traumatic growth. “Just because a bereaved parent has more compassion for others or changes careers, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t still miss her child and cry every night. Our best guess is that growth and distress are independent.”
Of course, growth doesn’t occur for everyone who experiences a life-changing shock. Stories of growth — no matter how inspiring — can create even more pain for trauma victims who haven’t experienced a growth rebound.
Calhoun and other experts on post-traumatic growth don’t try to push patients to think in terms of transformational growth unless they are moving that way on their own. “We never want to inadvertently contribute to someone’s burdens,” Calhoun says. Rather, they see their clinical role as one of “expert companionship” to patients, which includes openness to the possibilities of growth — without pushing it.
But for jolt survivors who do get involved in social causes and nonprofit work, the need to make things better for others — and working with others — has a healing effect. The work doesn’t make trauma disappear, but it does seem to create balance — it gives people a reason to get out of bed in the morning and put one foot in front of the other.
“It was the work that saved my life,” says Liz Alderman. “It gave me a reason to get out of bed, a reason to function at a high level and learn new things — get my brain working on something other than my loss. I thought I would never feel good about anything in my life again.”
Mark Miller, a columnist on retirement issues for Reuters, is author of “Jolt: Stories of Trauma and Transformation.” For more than a decade, he has studied what motivates people to reinvent their lives.
