ABOUT THE DOERING INSTITUTE
"People say that the world is not a forgiving place. Rather than accept this, I believe we should be asking why it isn't and how we fix it."
-Dr. Jessica Doering, Founder and President of The Doering Institute
CORE VALUES
The Doering Institute has several core values that motivate everything we do here. Whether it is working with schools, business professionals, or nonprofits and churches, we are here to make the world a more compassionate place. Our goal is to help you so that you can go and change the lives of those in your own sphere of influence! Here are a few things that set us apart in this space and that you can guarantee to expect from our team at all times:
First, there is HOPE for people who have experienced trauma...hope for health, healing, and growth. While we educate people about the impacts of trauma for the sake of developing strategies and processes for healing, we use a strengths-based approach and focus on the hope that there is for everyone to move forward in confidence with healing.
You are a professional and deserve to be treated as one! We are not here to tell you how to do your job! Instead, we will focus on helping you learn how what you do collides with trauma-informed practices to help make the world a more compassionate place. We focus on no-BS, no-fluff, all-value training that will help you excel in caring for others and yourself!
We also believe in having grace for ourselves and others who are on the trauma-informed care journey--the world needs more compassion! This journey inevitably leads to self-discovery that can be difficult and we know that we are certain to make mistakes around here, too...so let's agree to have compassion and grace for one another and lead with care.
Hi, I'm Dr. Jessica Doering, the Founder and President of The Doering Institute!
As a high school mathematics teacher, I encountered many students who, at the time, seemed to just be little stinkers. (I use the term affectionately.) But their hard attitudes, difficult behaviors, and frustrating views of their own abilities didn't turn me away but instead made me seek out how to love them better and teach them more effectively. It was these "stinks" that started my journey toward trauma-informed education.
Not long after I started teaching, I began volunteering with women in an industry that sees incredibly high rates of childhood trauma. Almost all of these women have experienced childhood sexual abuse, witnessed or personally experienced domestic violence, and have continued to experience trauma as an adult.
Fast forward to when I went back to graduate school and my husband and I became foster parents (*which, looking back was a crazy time to do that, but it all worked out for us*). We now had the trauma symptoms and frustrating behaviors in our home, in our children. We are now adoptive parents through foster care and are intimately acquainted with how childhood trauma can impact kids, both in the short term and long term.
This topic is so personal to me, as I have walked alongside people professionally and personally who have been through really hard things. I spent thousands of hours reading and researching trauma-informed care culminating in a PhD in STEM Education with a dissertation on trauma-informed education and the preschool-to-prison pipeline. People kept asking, "What do you want to do with your degree?" And I finally decided--I wanted to make the world a more compassionate place through trauma-informed care education. This is why The Doering Institute was created, and I am overjoyed to have you join me on this mission!