Impact
We ask the same questions before and after. Here's what moves.
Every participant completes a survey at the beginning of a series and again at the end. Nobody is asked to describe what happened to them — only how they are doing. These are the average shifts across our quarterly series.
What goes up
More safety. More belonging. More to work with.
+47.5%
Sense of belonging
+42.5%
Sense of safety
+27.5%
Able to cope when triggered
What comes down
The symptoms that make a week unliveable.
-32.5%
Feelings of anxiety
-25%
Hypervigilance
-20.5%
Flashbacks
-35%
Trouble breathing
Figures are self-reported pre/post survey averages collected by The Thriving Initiative across its quarterly series. Individual campuses report their own results — UCSB participants, for instance, reported a 69% increase in sense of safety and a 60% increase in boundary knowledge in one recent cohort.
In their words
Numbers are the floor, not the point.
“I was having horrible recurring flashbacks daily before this program, and in finding community with other survivors, that has been reduced to none in the past month.”
TNJS participant
Shared anonymously
“The work that The Thriving Initiative does is so important because it focuses on how to heal outside of a therapist's office.”
Tony Muñoz
Program officer & volunteer
“What makes Thriving unique is the perspective that healing trauma requires more than therapy alone.”
Kathi Scarminach
TNJS provider & local artist
Where we are
Three campuses, and a model built to travel.
TNJS started as one series at UC Santa Barbara in 2019. It now runs each academic quarter at UCSB, San Diego State and San Francisco State, with separate undergraduate and graduate groups, plus community programs open beyond campus.
7 weeks
Length of every TNJS series
7 leaders
Clinicians and community instructors per series
$0
Cost to any participant, for anything