You Can Get There from Here: Exploring the Impact of Trauma on Youth Through the Narrative Constellations of Multigenerational Parents in the Community

The goal of this study is to fill the gap of research by looking beyondthe field of education to discover how the community and specificallyparents view community trauma and how they perceive the impact trauma has on the county's youth. Using narrative inquiry methods such as creating narratives through individual interviews, recording field notes, using a reflective journal, and photo-elicitation artifacts will bring a voice to the people in the community and discover their stories of resiliency through their perspectives and voices.My findings are described using the community's own voice. By doing this, the characteristics and personalities that makeup Ant County can be utilized to incorporate the stories of the people within it. Research results show a collective group of people who are protective of children and theircommunity. The stories allow the readers to see the trauma faced by parents in a small, rural, and southern community who have found their own ways to cope with tremendous grief, and intergenerational trauma including poverty, substance abuse, violence, and sexual assault. Thereaders will also hear the testimonies of resilience through individual coping and the role of education in the participants' lives and those of their children.