Minnesota Child Response Center

Operating as a virtual center, the Minnesota Child Response Center (MnCRC) is housed at the University of Minnesota, but is a community-
university partnership involving 14 private and public entities. The partnership was built over several years prior to receiving SAMHSA funding, and was developed to meet the mental health and trauma-informed service needs of children exposed to
violence in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. This
broad base of community experts includes mental health providers, culturally specific and mainstream social service providers, supportive housing
agencies, schools, police, child service systems,
and University of Minnesota researchers.

The goals of MnCRC are to integrate evidence-
based interventions into community systems of
care for traumatized homeless and formerly
homeless children in the Minneapolis/St. Paul
metro area; and to create a continuum of care for highly diverse groups of underserved children and families including refugee and immigrant children.

Dr. Abi Gewirtz, project director for MnCRC, notes that MnCRC’s “broad community partnership allows us to pool our resources and expand our reach beyond what any single agency or system could accomplish.” The involvement of both government
and private insurers enables sustainability efforts to focus on developing and accessing new and current funding streams. By bridging and sustaining collaborative efforts among and between their
partner agencies, MnCRC is able to forge new pathways of care for its target population.

For example, agencies within the center collaborate
to increase access to care for traumatized children
by partnering with mental health clinics and community “frontline” agencies (e.g., shelters, supportive housing, police, schools). Mental health professionals work closely with frontline staff to provide training and ongoing consultation in trauma and child development to facilitate screening of traumatized children and families, and to adapt and deliver evidence-based trauma-focused interventions. Mental health providers are currently implementing
TF-CBT in several housing locations, and
preparations are under way for a pilot test of the CBITS intervention with a new Hmong immigrant
group in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

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The MnCRC’s child development-policing program (CDPP) increases access to care for traumatized children by reaching families who call the police for violent incidents involving children. More than 70% of families reached by CDPP over a two-year period had never previously accessed social or mental health services for violence exposure. CDPP team members from several agencies reflect the diversity of the community served and provide psychoeducational material for families in several languages.

Significant numbers of traumatized children served by shelter and housing agencies do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD- or trauma-related distress, but do exhibit acting-out symptoms. Homeless parents may be overwhelmed with multiple stressors and are more likely to have been maltreated as children themselves, providing them little in the way of positive parenting role models. Moreover, frontline providers rarely have access to evidence-based preventive interventions that they can implement, and so must often rely on sometimes elusive mental health professionals. For these reasons, the MnCRC is adapting and implementing a group-based model parenting curriculum, Parenting Through Change (Forgatch & DeGarmo, 1999), aimed at reducing trauma-related conduct problems in homeless children by supporting parenting and improving family interactions.

Parenting Through Change (PTC) uses the Oregon model of Parent Management Training (Patterson, 1986, 2005), which is based on decades of research with high-risk (including violence-exposed) children and families, and which has been used in several effective treatment models. Because of its focus on parenting in the context of conflict and crisis, PTC is appropriate for adaptation and dissemination with homeless and violence-exposed families. Although the training is extensive, the intervention does not require delivery by mental health professionals, thus MnCRC’s adaptation and implementation team includes frontline providers such as shelter and housing advocates. The group intervention format offers: 1) social support to mothers who are often isolated and lacking in social support, 2) cost-effectiveness, and 3) an appropriate delivery mode for domestic violence and homeless shelters or supportive housing.

Through their collaborative work in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, MnCRC hopes to provide the seeds for the development of a model network that will be replicable throughout the larger NCTSN network.