We’re Going to Traumatize our GPT
Creating a welcoming environment that encourages Help Seeking Behavior (HSB) is the first and most illusive goal of creating a trauma-informed community. What if AI could learn from those who have been through trauma to better deliver cutting edge mentorship and life skill strategies? Trauma Trained GPT could destroy the margins, and unlock a hidden American superpower that changes the way we educate, employ and skill train.
From the Art Gang “Face Your Fears” Collections. Art Gang uses art as a therapeutic bridge to recovery from gangs, addiction disorder, incarceration, PTSD and trafficking.
OpenAI recently released GPTs that customers can customize and use for specific purposes. OpenAI’s site states that these GPTs can be used to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others.
For HeroBridge this is groundbreaking news that we immediately started taking advantage of. It takes us one step closer to the goal of delivering intuitive mentorship, informed learning tracks and predictive models that can make individuals, teams and communities healthier and more productive. By destroying the margins, all boats will rise with the tide.
HeroBridge’s new ability to design virtual mentors who can assist real world mentors, or interact in a controlled way with community members-in-need creates the opportunity to scale HeroBridge so it can deliver larger and smarter impact. Mentor shortage and burnout are global problems that stand in the way of erasing the margins and empowering entire segments of our society socially and economically. What makes HeroBridge work is its ability to create a community of trauma-informed kinship that wraps members with resources and paths to recovery and sustainability. We create resilient citizens with social safety nets that many have never had in their entire lives.
This update gives us the ability to train our GPT on cutting edge mentorship techniques that years of our data show works. When combined with a language model that phrases the assistance in a compassionate and trauma-informed way we can increase the likelihood of follow-through and help-seeking-behavior that can be seamlessly followed up upon. Each of the outcomes adds to the depth and richness of the AI’s predictive quality.
Let’s take Televerde as an example. Its process of taking women in their last year of incarceration and readying them for release directly into employment has resulted in over three hundred women placed and a zero percent recidivism rate. (The average recidivism rate is 48%.) If you think it’s as easy as making sure every inmate has job training before they are released, you’d be wrong. It is the supportive community and wrap around mentorship and resources that follows them into perpetuity that is the real driver of these results. (HeroBridge is excited to announce that it will be producing the Televerde documentary in 2024.)
“How can we expect to rehabilitate young people who have never been habilitated in the first place? Who have never had a positive compassionate role model or supportive relationship in their entire life? Who have never had someone, or some community that they know will be there for them 24/7? That has their back? There’s a hero inside each one of them, and our communities reveal it to them through ceaseless compassion.” - Frank Connelly, co-founder HeroBridge Technologies.
HeroBridge has been able to bottle the secret sauce that makes communities like Televerde work. Our flagship app for Stepping Forward LA, is a trauma-informed community for former foster youth age 18-26. We have over four years of data collected from the millions of micro-transactions that have occurred between thousands of community members and their mentors. With a legion of former-foster mentors and loads of immersive features, members feel they are in a trusted community with the only goal being their success and welfare. Members start to believe in themselves, feel supported, are no longer afraid of failure and make the very human decision to seek help for the things they know are holding them back. We have the data to prove it, but that’s no enough. Our GPT will be trained on these outcomes, and the paths members and mentors have taken to reach them. The GPT’s depth of learning and pattern recognition will also improve the way we deliver services, and result in powerfully valuable predictive models about how to improve real world mentorship, community, team goal-setting, skill building, incentives and root causes of attrition. These results will likewise be used to train our GPT and can be used by industry, institutions and government to build healthier and more productive communities.
The commonalities between our communities is often striking - the same trauma-informed relationship, learning and development paths that work for one community often work for others. This is not limited to those who are disadvantaged, but in fact a lacking universal need within our highly individualized society. Whether at home, at work or school, we all desire kinship and supportive relationships that could assist us overcoming the limitations that are holding us back from our full potential. Our GPT will be a powerful tool and vigilant companion that takes compassionate and caring queues, combined with intuitive and proven learning tracks derived directly from the communities who needed it the most.
Intercepting youth as they transition, versus when they ‘crater’ is the core value offering of HeroBridge Communities and what guides our technology development.
The Upshot
250,000 youth exit the foster system annually. These youth have a disproportionate risk of incarceration and other bad outcomes. There are over two million Americans incarcerated. The Green New Deal and its promise of a new American economic era requires 1.8 million jobs by 2030. This is America’s hidden engine and we intend to support it. Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI said on The Daily Show that society “can and should shape (how AI is used.)” This is how we intend to rise to her challenge. Not just for the marginalized, but for business, government and institutions that they may make more informed decisions and build intuitive tracks that release the full power of human potential through compassion and a wrap around mentorship community of resources and support.
If you’d like to join us in traumatizing our GPT, and thereby creating a more caring and supportive world, contact deborah@herobridge.io or sign up for our newsletter to stay in touch.
