Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Toolkit

Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Educating System of Care Partners

4-Hour General Training “Trauma Informed Care – Key Principles and Assumptions.” This curriculum provides an introduction to trauma and trauma informed approaches. No prior knowledge about trauma is necessary before someone participates in this training, which is intended for a wide range of potential audiences including direct service providers, supervisors and administrators, advocates, service recipients, and interested community members. This training forms the basis for more advanced work in developing trauma informed environments and practices, leaving participants with an expectation of using the principles to change their organizational culture. The entire “Trauma Informed Care – Key Principles and Assumptions” course in its original form, would take about eight hours of instructional time. With permission of the NICTIC director, we condensed it to a four-hour course so more service providers could attend. The version of the course we developed has three modules. The learning objectives of module one include: gaining a shared understanding of trauma, how to identify trauma, the effects of trauma on brain development, and a trauma survivor case study. For the case study, we typically show a video called Removed that is publicly available 1 . Whenever using copyrighted content, check with your organization about obeying copyright laws. We have consulted with our organizations, and we use publicly available content, and give credit and source on the slide that contains the video. Removed is a reenactment of the true story of a child growing up in a home characterized by domestic violence and alcohol abuse who has a parent with criminal justice system involvement. The main character in the story is placed into two different foster care situations. One setting depicts non-trauma responsive foster care while the second foster home illustrates a more trauma informed approach. This video allows training participants to see abuse through the eyes of a child and hear the child’s self-talk as she narrates her story. It is intense to watch and can possibly trigger strong reactions in people, particularly those with lived trauma. Before showing the video, we Trainings Over the past four years, we have developed several trainings, some general, and some tailored to particular disciplines. As the demand grew, we developed a Train-the-Trainer training. We have described each below.

1

Length 12:48; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOeQUwdAjE0

25