Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Toolkit

Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Foreword

The first time I, Becky, ever heard the words trauma-informed care and information about the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study was in the summer of 2014. At the time, I was working at the Johnson City, Tennessee Police Department as the Director of an $800,000 grant-funded Targeted Community Crime Reduction Project to reduce drug-related and violent crime in neighborhoods historically defined by these characteristics. Most of my career has been spent developing and implementing educational programs for various organizations, but hearing this message impacted me in a way that no other content ever had. The opioid crisis has challenged community leaders in rural Appalachia to look outside the box for solutions and ACEs science and trauma informed care seemed essential, and in my mind, overlooked. I literally felt that an understanding of trauma informed care was as important as learning the cure for cancer and if I did not tell my community about it, in some way, I would be held responsible. In 2014, the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a concept paper entitled Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma- Informed Approach 1 with the recommendation that communities address trauma by viewing it as an important component of effective behavioral health service delivery. Additionally, it was SAMHSA’s guidance that communities should address trauma through a multi-agency public health approach inclusive of public education and awareness, prevention and early identification, and effective trauma-specific assessment and treatment. Following this guidance and partnering in June of 2015 with a long-time friend, Dr. Andi Clements from the East Tennessee State University Department of Psychology, we set out to educate our town. Though our superiors were supportive, we had no funding for this effort and maintained our full-time job duties as we moved forward. In August of 2015, we reached out for technical assistance from Dr. Joan Gillece, Director of the SAMHSA-funded, National Center for Trauma Informed Care (NCTIC), who came to Johnson City in October 2015 to introduce trauma-informed concepts to our community. We had a wide cross-section of professionals and community leaders in attendance. Following her visit, Dr. Gillece provided us with a draft of a SAMHSA course, Trauma Informed Approach, Key Principles and Assumptions. In less than three years, we trained over 4,000 professionals and created a System of Care that now has over 45 affiliated organizations and meets bi-monthly. Beyond embracing the significance of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, our community partners have begun to implement trauma informed concepts into their programming in many inspiring ways.

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https://store.samhsa.gov/system/files/sma14-4884.pdf

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