Barbara Mumby Huerta: Trauma-Informed Governance Beyond DEI
- barbaramumby1
- Jan 18
- 4 min read
What Institutional Leadership Requires Now
For more than twenty five years, I have worked inside public agencies, national foundations, and nonprofit cultural institutions during moments of conflict, transition, and reckoning. I have overseen multimillion-dollar funding portfolios, led national grantmaking programs, launched new cultural institutions, and helped dismantle structures that no longer served the communities they claimed to support.
Across all of this work, one lesson has become increasingly clear: DEI alone is insufficient for institutional transformation.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks—while necessary—do not address the deeper question of how institutions themselves are shaped by trauma, nor how that trauma is reproduced through governance, policy, and decision-making. Without confronting this reality, organizations risk mistaking representation for repair and compliance for accountability.
What is needed now is trauma-informed governance—a leadership approach that understands how historical harm, structural inequity, and institutional behavior intersect, and that embeds this understanding into how power is exercised.
The Limits of DEI as a Governing Framework
DEI initiatives often focus on outcomes that are visible and measurable: who is hired, who is funded, who is invited into the room. These are important metrics. I have designed and overseen equity-centered grantmaking systems that redirected the majority of public funding toward historically marginalized communities, and I stand firmly behind that work.
But governance failures rarely stem from a lack of diversity alone. They emerge when decision-making structures are rigid, opaque, reactive, or disconnected from the lived realities of those most impacted by institutional choices.
In my experience, institutions can diversify staff and boards while continuing to operate under policies that prioritize risk aversion over responsibility, optics over truth, and stability over justice. In these cases, DEI becomes a layer added onto an unchanged core—asked to absorb tension without the authority to resolve it.
Trauma-informed governance asks a different question: How does harm move through systems, and what does leadership owe in response?
Understanding Institutional Trauma
Trauma is not only individual. It is also collective, historical, and institutional.
Public agencies and cultural organizations often carry unresolved histories: displacement, exclusion, cultural erasure, broken trust, and unacknowledged violence. These histories live on in policies, funding criteria, memorials, hiring practices, and informal power dynamics.
I have seen this most clearly in my work around public art, monuments, and cultural memory. When institutions resist confronting harmful narratives embedded in their own collections or civic landscapes, the resistance is rarely about history alone. It is about fear of loss—of authority, legitimacy, or control.
Trauma-informed governance does not treat these moments as public relations crises. It recognizes them as predictable points of rupture when unresolved harm surfaces. The role of leadership is not to suppress disruption, but to steward institutions through it with clarity, humility, and accountability.
What Trauma-Informed Governance Actually Requires
Based on my experience leading through institutional change, trauma-informed governance is not a program or a training. It is a practice of leadership that reshapes how decisions are made.
At minimum, it requires five shifts:
1. From Control to Responsibility
Traditional governance often prioritizes control—over narrative, over risk, over process. Trauma-informed governance prioritizes responsibility: to communities, to history, and to future impact.
This means accepting that not all outcomes can be managed, but all decisions can be made ethically.
2. From Speed to Deliberateness
Institutions under pressure often move quickly to demonstrate action. In moments of conflict, speed can feel reassuring. But trauma-informed governance values deliberate decision-making, especially when harm has occurred.
Slowing down to listen, consult, and reflect is not weakness; it is a recognition that rushed decisions often replicate harm.
3. From Optics to Substance
DEI work is frequently evaluated through optics—statements issued, committees formed, initiatives launched. Trauma-informed governance asks whether those actions change power dynamics, resource flows, or accountability mechanisms.
If they do not, they are insufficient.
4. From Individual Blame to Structural Analysis
When institutions fail, there is often a rush to identify individual fault. Trauma-informed governance insists on structural analysis: How did policies, incentives, or governance models produce this outcome?
This does not absolve individuals of responsibility, but it prevents organizations from repeating the same patterns under new leadership.
5. From Transactional Equity to Relational Accountability
Equity is not transactional. It cannot be fulfilled solely through grants awarded or positions filled. Trauma-informed governance understands equity as relational—rooted in trust, reciprocity, and long-term accountability.
This requires sustained engagement, not one-time gestures.
Governance at the Intersection of Power and Healing
In my leadership roles, I have witnessed how institutions change when governance structures acknowledge both power and pain—and refuse to separate them.
When organizations adopt trauma-informed governance, several things happen:
Decision-making becomes more transparent and principled
Staff are better supported during periods of change
Communities experience institutions as accountable rather than performative
Conflict is addressed directly rather than deferred
Leadership credibility increases, even when decisions are difficult
Importantly, trauma-informed governance does not mean avoiding conflict. It means meeting conflict with preparation, integrity, and courage.
Why This Matters Now
We are living through a period of intensified scrutiny of institutions—cultural, civic, and philanthropic. Communities are asking harder questions about who holds power, how decisions are made, and whose histories are honored or erased.
DEI frameworks alone cannot meet this moment. They were not designed to address institutional repair.
Trauma-informed governance offers a path forward—not by replacing equity work, but by deepening it, grounding it in accountability rather than aspiration.
For leaders, this requires a willingness to move beyond comfort and compliance toward ethical stewardship. For institutions, it demands courage: to examine their own histories honestly and to govern with an understanding that healing and justice are not side effects of good leadership—they are core responsibilities.
Closing Reflection
I have learned that institutions do not fail because they lack values. They fail because they lack governance structures capable of holding those values under pressure.
Trauma-informed governance is not about perfection. It is about readiness—readiness to lead responsibly in a world shaped by historical harm and ongoing inequity.
If we are serious about equity, then we must be equally serious about how we govern.
Barbara Mumby Huerta is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural strategist whose work foregrounds community narratives, equity, and identity in public cultural spaces.
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