Who Helps the Helpers? Imperatore Award Funds Workshops on Secondary Trauma for Community Workers

Associate Professor in the master’s in public administration (MPA) program Jenny Mincin is the 2026-2027 Imperatore Community Forum Fellowship recipient. The fellowship, endowed through the SUNY Empire Foundation, supports research projects or activities that culminate in a community forum. Mincin’s project consists of community workshops for frontline and non-governmental organization (NGO) workers on crisis intervention, and self-care and secondary trauma, alongside two open educational resource (OER) books.

Burnout. Compassion fatigue. These are terms nestled beside secondary trauma, a phenomenon that is well-documented among nurses, doctors, and first responders, which also often impacts NGO and social service workers. “A lot of the time, those who are providing crisis management, doing case management work, social work, employment and food security specialists are often overlooked. I know because I come from that world,” Mincin says. Frontline aid workers face traumatic situations—but who helps those whose job it is to help others? This is where Mincin’s workshops and OERs come into play.

The associate professor spent 20 years in the field doing domestic and international humanitarian work before teaching full-time at SUNY Empire. Early in her career, she worked with HIV/AIDS patients in New York City, and later, with populations impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Mincin also joined the International Rescue Committee, where she completed her dissertation. “My area of expertise is disaster and humanitarian work, and vulnerable populations—that’s where I publish and teach,” Mincin shares. For over a decade, she has been a full-time associate professor at SUNY Empire, where she developed the disaster and crisis management and nonprofit concentrations in the Master’s in Public Administration program.

Mincin was driven to start the community workshops the Imperatore Award now funds because “the same people who are in our programs—in the MPA program, in our undergraduate programs—they’re in the field. This is critical work.” It began three years ago, when a local community group providing aid to refugees from the war in Ukraine asked Mincin for a two-hour session that grew into a day-long crisis intervention training through the EU for Health program. She was later approached by the Irish Red Cross with the idea of scaling up, and workshop requests continued to roll in as time went on.

For Mincin, the Imperatore Award provides the resources to continue coordinating the venues, food, and travel that sustain these sessions. “I can now go into the community, do these workshops, and buy them a sandwich and a cup of coffee to give them a bit of respite that they deserve, because they’re doing such incredibly hard work,” she says. “This fellowship has been tremendous.”

Providing care for frontline workers who experience secondary trauma is crucial for organizations to thrive. “By taking care of our community workers and NGO workers, we can help prevent them from having physical and mental health issues down the road,” explains Mincin. “For organizations that institute these changes, their retention is through the roof. They have greater longevity and satisfaction,” she says.

Besides continuing to lead workshops, Mincin also plans to publish two OER books with the support of the SUNY Empire online library and SUNY OER services. The first will be a secondary trauma and self-care workbook, and the second a humanitarian and disaster mental health book with contributions from several experts. “It’s important that these texts be OERs published through SUNY, so that everybody can access it,” Mincin says.