Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention (AIP) created the Center for Trauma Care in Schools (CTCS) in 2016 through Cat. III funding from SAMHSA/NCTSI. The Center continues to be a hub for training and school-based delivery of evidence-based practices (EBPs) to treat traumatic stress in children in public schools in Massachusetts. AIP collaborates with Boston Public Schools (BPS), community mental health providers, graduate schools of social work and counseling, and the MA School Mental Health Consortium (MASMHC) to train clinicians and school-based interns to deliver evidence-based treatments (EBTs) to children with traumatic stress symptoms. Training provided by CTCS increases the number of school-based clinicians who can deliver EBPs for trauma, significantly increasing access to these needed services. CTCS also trains teachers and staff in trauma-informed practices, aligning closely with many district initiatives to address trauma and promote social-emotional wellness. In addition, CTCS provides evidence-informed group trauma treatment in Spanish for immigrant children and youth using STRONG (Supporting Transition Resilience Of Newcomer Groups). CTCS has 3 main goals: (1) To increase access to trauma services via school-based interventions; (2) To improve quality of services through provision of a continuum of evidence-based treatments; (3) To foster school environments that are more culturally responsive and trauma-informed.
Network Members
This listing of NCTSN members includes current grantees as well as NCTSN Affiliates, former grantees who have maintained their ties to the Network.
Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention, Center for Trauma Care in Schools
Baystate Medical Center - The Building Resiliency in Young Children
The Building Resiliency in Young Children (BRYC) program at Baystate Medical Center has the overarching goal of improving access to and quality of trauma-informed services for all children 0-5 years old and their caregivers. BRYC is expanding access to and coordination of trauma-informed early childhood mental health services by providing trauma-informed mental health screening and assessments, evidence-based trauma-informed therapy (Child Parent Psychotherapy and Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), and psychoeducation groups for foster parents and biological caregivers. BRYC collaborates with existing infant and early childhood systems of care to provide trauma-informed educational opportunities for child serving professionals and clinicians.
Baystate Medical Center - The Child Advocacy Training and Support Center
The Child Advocacy Training and Support Center (CATS) in Baystate Medical Center’s Dept of Psychiatry coordinates and consolidates the vast resources and expertise of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) to support Child Advocacy Centers (CACs) in meeting their mission with the primary goal of increasing access to trauma informed services for children and their families. The CATS Center team, in partnership with national experts on CAC service delivery, evidence-based treatment (EBT) trauma curriculum developers, and stakeholders representing each multidisciplinary team (MDT), disseminates trauma informed care (TIC) training across the CAC system. The CATS Center goals are: 1) Establishing a national training center to support CACs in ensuring their MDT members are trauma-informed and have specialized tools, skills, and resources for effective service delivery. 2) Increasing system capacity and competencies of the CAC MDT professionals’ (i.e., medical, mental health, law enforcement, child-welfare, victim advocates) trauma-informed response using a learning collaborative model and specialized curriculum specific to each discipline. 3. Increasing availability of training in EBTs, such as Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy to mental health professionals within CACs. 3) Supporting sustainability of TIC throughout CAC MDTs by serving as a continuing resource for training, consultation, and technical assistance and providing additional training regarding priority areas such as commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking, problem sexual behaviors, screening and engagement, and secondary traumatic stress prevention. 4) Developing and consolidate NCTSN products specifically for CAC service systems such as factsheets and webinars.
Boston Children's Hospital - Project EPIC (Enhancing Pediatric Integrative Care)
Project EPIC - Enhancing Pediatric Integrative Care combines the content and clinical expertise of Boston Children’s Hospital Centers in Boston, MA: the Boston Children's Hospital Primary Care Center (CHPCC), its satellite community primary care clinic Martha Eliot Health Center (MEHC), and the Trauma and Community Resilience Center (TCRC). More specifically, Project EPIC recognizes primary care pediatric clinics as an advantageous place for delivering mental health services for children, especially ethnocultural minority youth and is embedded within CHPCC and MEHC’s Behavioral Health Integration teams. Project EPIC aims to increase access and engagement of youth and their families who have experienced trauma, with a specific focus on racial/ethnic minority youth and refugee/immigrant youth. To achieve our aim, we will implement Trauma Systems Therapy (TST) and components of its adaptation for refugees (TST-R). TST-R is a multitier model designed to address barriers to treatment access and engagement. TST-R partners cultural brokers with clinicians for service delivery. Cultural brokers are community members who represent the cultural group intended to be engaged and ensure that the culture, language, and worldview of the client are integrated into clinical practice. Project EPIC leverages cultural knowledge through the use of cultural brokers and bi- or multi-cultural clinical staff. Importantly, we partner with other Massachusetts organizations to achieve our mission namely the Refugee and Immigrant Assistance Center (RIAC) and the Home for Little Wanderers (HFLW) and other NCTSN Cat II sites, namely NYU Center for Child Welfare Practice Innovation.
Boston Children’s Hospital - Refugee Trauma and Resilience Center
Over the past two decades, our center has developed, adapted and disseminated evidence-informed trainings, resources, and intervention models with refugee and immigrant youth that support providers across diverse community and service-system settings. This includes Trauma Systems Therapy for Refugees (TST-R), an evidence-based multi-tier intervention that is effective in both engaging and treating traumatized refugee and immigrant youth. The purpose of this project is to provide national expertise on trauma-informed services for refugee and immigrant children and their families, and to support the continued adaptation and widespread dissemination of Trauma Systems Therapy for Refugees (TST-R), an empirically-supported clinical and organizational treatment model. The TCRC will provide widely-accessible training on trauma-informed best practices with refugee and immigrant children, and serve as a resource for providers working with other traumatized populations.
Boston Medical Center - Department of Child Psychiatry
Expanding access to culturally responsive outpatient treatment of trauma for children from birth to 17 years of age and their families at a safety-net hospital.
Clinical and Support Options (CSO)
The “Stress, Trauma, and Resilience” (STaR ll) project is an NCTSN Category III Trauma Center serving western Massachusetts and northern parts of Worcester County. The program is being implemented by Clinical and Support Options (CSO), which is a community-based nonprofit behavioral health agency providing individuals and families with comprehensive and holistic care. CSO embraces a trauma-informed culture in fulfillment of its mission to provide responsive and effective interventions and therapeutic services to support adults, children and families. CSO serves more than 18,000 individuals and families annually in their quest for stability, growth and an enhanced quality of life. The STaR ll project has three activity areas: 1. Implementing the “ARC Framework” (Attachment, Regulation, and Competency) as the primary treatment framework for therapy with clients from the ages of 2 to 20 who have experienced trauma, in all of our child and family programs. 2. Providing staff training on trauma-informed practices along two tracks: Track 1, training on diverse topics related to trauma informed care; and Track 2, treatment specific training on the ARC Framework. 3. Building community collaboration and awareness of trauma-informed practices through agency-to agency training and consulting, targeted events aimed at raising awareness about stress and trauma with school staff and members of other helping professions, and general public events aimed at systems change in the community as a whole.
Goldman Fraser, Jenifer
Jenifer Goldman Fraser was the former PI for the Boston site of the Early Trauma Treatment Network, the Child Witness to Violence Project at Boston Medical Center. in that capacity, Jenifer served as faculty for the senior leadership track for Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) Learning Collaboratives in Massachusetts where she developed a CPP sustainability tool. Jenifer is now the Senior Research Analyst and Program Development Specialist for ZERO TO THREE's Infant-Toddler Court Program, a national initiative to support implementation of infant-toddler court teams in jurisdictions across the United States funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration Maternal and Child Health Bureau. She recently co-authored a set of online learning modules on enhanced practices for judges and attorneys to meet the needs of very young children involved with child welfare services that will be available on the Child Welfare Information Gateway Learning Center in early 2019. She produced a module on parent trauma and on building a trauma-responsive court for the online curriculum. Additionally, Jenifer was the PI for the first comparative effectiveness review of interventions for children exposed to trauma, conducted under the auspices of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Effective Health Care Program and which used exhaustive systematic review methodology to assess the strength of the evidence in support of interventions.
Institute for Health and Recovery
The Institute for Health and Recovery (IHR), a non-profit agency founded in 1989, improves access to and quality of evidence-based trauma-informed care for families, individuals, youth, and pregnant and parenting women affected by trauma, mental illness and substance use disorder (SUD), while advancing principles of health equity and social justice throughout Massachusetts. In 2009, with funding from NCTSN, IHR created BRIGHT (Building Resilience through Intervention: Growing Healthier Together), a dyadic intervention for pregnant and parenting women with SUD and their children 0-6 years old, which addresses attachment and focuses on reflective functioning and emotional regulation. The BRIGHT intervention is designed to support family recovery through a lens that understands child development, SUD, trauma, and parenting. IHR continues to utilize aspects of the BRIGHT intervention in our statewide work, including Project Promise, the state's only day treatment program specifically for pregnant and parenting women, as well as in our work training providers of SUD and child welfare services in the needs of this population. IHR is supported by the state's Bureau of Substance Addiction Services (BSAS) to provide a Pregnant Women's Access Line, offering counseling and placement services over the phone. IHR provides training, consultation, technical assistance and curriculum development for state, local and national organizations to improve integration of best practices and policies into prevention and treatment programs, including but not limited to working with parent-child dyads using the BRIGHT intervention. Often, this includes collaborating with developer(s) of interventions such as Child Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) and ARC Grow.
Jen Malcolm-Brown
Jen Malcolm-Brown, LICSW, is currently offering training, consultation, and clinical practice. Jen has prior involvement in three NCTSN Category II & III centers since 2010.