July 2022 Staff Spotlight - Wilma Friesema
What is your role at EPIC ‘Ohana?
My job title is: `Ohana Connections and Staff Development Manager. At EPIC I wear a number of hats: I help youth in foster care reconnect with their families; I provide support to EPIC’s staff through trainings and private consultations; I write for various publications and help produce videos; I serve on several committees; I review and edit Wrap summaries; and, at times, I provide trainings for CWS and other organizations. In all of these endeavors I feel entrusted to enhance the well-being of the people I have the privilege to work with.
What is your favorite EPIC ‘Ohana story?
This is a story from my early `Ohana Connections work, but it really captures how EPIC creates opportunities for family members to come forward and support each other. I was working on behalf of a 16-year-old boy who had been adopted when he was 2, but the adoption had failed several years before I came on board. I reached out to his bio paternal grandparents, but his grandmother was very cautious. Both of his parents were incarcerated and had been for many years, so she was afraid he might be headed in that direction too. I tried to reassure her that he was a good kid, but she just asked me for his name and said they wanted time to think about it.
A few days later she called me and asked if I was sitting down. When I assured her I was, she said, “Wilma, I know Makani! He’s been my bag boy at Tamura’s for the past 6 months. I love him!” The grandma was a cashier and she had been working right next to her grandson all that time. She didn’t know they were related because he still had his adopted last name. It wasn’t long before Makani went to live with his grandparents.
How would you describe EPIC ‘Ohana in one word?
Supportive. We’re supportive of the families and youth we work with, but also of each other and the community members we work with too.
What would you like others to know about EPIC ‘Ohana?
As an agency, EPIC has a lot of emotional intelligence and wisdom. At EPIC, we care about policies and procedures, but our main concern is how those structures impact and serve the families we work with. We are always striving to work with CWS and other service providers to improve how families and youth are treated and supported.
EPIC’s core values guide all that we do. At its heart is an honoring and respect for the individual and the family. We try to encourage positive growth and autonomy; we want parents and youth to come into their own and have a functional and fulfilling life that’s of their making. We want them to have that sense of security which comes from having family and a feeling of community.
EPIC has that same attitude towards its employees and other members of the CWS service provider community. We honor and respect everyone’s contribution and encourage their development and growth. We collaborate with others, internally and externally, to sustain and promote a deep sense of community and shared effort. We try to be positive promoters of change, even during the most challenging of interactions. We strive to “walk the talk.”
As an agency, EPIC isn’t perfect, but its foundational heart and purpose are solid and that makes a huge difference. The changes it has made, and continues to make, in the world of CWS is profound. Because of who we are, EPIC is able to create safe spaces where real and important conversations can be held. And it’s in those spaces that real healing and change can happen.
What is your personal philosophy?
That’s a big question. I’d say that what my many years of working with people has taught me is that each of us is a unique being with an inner spirit, or essence, that holds our deepest truth. We may be connected to or disconnected to that essence to varying degrees based on our life circumstances and experiences, but it’s there, no matter how deeply its buried or protected.
Caring about that deep inner spirit, that essence, has been a focus of mine throughout my career. As a former psychotherapist who specialized in working with trauma survivors, I learned healing is enhanced by deep listening and providing a verbal reflective mirror that honors that spirit, even if it’s covered by the defenses and distortions that reverberate in trauma’s wake. It’s when it’s safe enough for a person to connect with their inner truth, I’ve found, that trauma’s power over them begins to crumble.
When I moved to Hawai`i, I was fortunate to land at EPIC where that honoring of a person’s being -- of who they are before and beyond the traumas they may have endured -- is at the heart of what we do. We continually strive to reflect a person’s worth back to them, even if they can’t yet see it themselves.
What are you listening to/reading these days?
I’m reading a wonderful book entitled: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, written by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It’s a powerful, soulful book that weaves together the scientific and the sacred, and will have you rethinking your relationship to plants and the planet.
