Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Toolkit

Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Aim High To Reach All

Steps to raise awareness of ACEs science and trauma informed care by starting just where you are were provided in Chapter 2 Getting Started . No matter what your role is in the community, within your immediate circle you have partners where you can advocate for creating a trauma informed system of care. After taking those initial steps, your efforts will have created awareness and piqued interest. In the next step, you began training your partners. This section focuses on building capacity in your system of care, and as you do, you should be careful not to overlook any sector. One way to approach this capacity building is to imagine the interactions of someone who is utilizing services. It is common this person will interact with multiple service providers. For example, if someone is a victim of domestic violence, they may need services from an emergency shelter, counselors, law enforcement, and legal advisors. If this person has biological, adopted, or foster children, there could also be involvement of school staff, coaches, after-school programs, foster care, and mental health professionals. It is easy to see that services needed to assist just one person will include four or more different kinds of community partners as they navigate. If only one agency speaks the language of trauma informed care and the others do not, it can create barriers to recovery and lost opportunities for resilience building. Service providers who are not trauma responsive might even re-traumatize the person in the process of serving them. In Johnson City, as we began to educate our system partners using the trainings discussed in Chapter 3 Educating System of Care Partners , it became apparent that additional education through specialized trainings was needed. This chapter describes trainings that have been tailored to several common contexts.

No matter what your role is in the community, with in your immediate circle you have partners where you can advocate for creating a trauma informed system of care.

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