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 Health
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-Dept of Psychiatry
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.
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.
Department of Child Psychiatry, Boston Medical Center
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.
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.
Jewish Family and Children's Service of Boston
Early Connections/Conexiones Tempranas II(EC/CT II), a project of the Center for Early Relationship Support (CERS) of Jewish Family and Children's Service (JF&CS), is designed to address traumatic stress and build resilience in children birth to five, while reducing disparities in mental health access among marginalized populations, particularly Latino immigrant families living in Waltham, MA and nearby communities. EC/CT II targets the interrelated goals of preventing trauma to infants and young children, interrupting intergenerational cycles of re-traumatization, and treating infants and young children exposed to traumatic events. The project will serve families with young children coping with multiple adversities: parental substance use or mental illness; domestic abuse; community violence; homelessness; separation from a primary caregiver and/or immigration.
Justice Resource Institute - Building Resilience through Residential Communities
The Building Resilience through Residential Communities (BRTRC) project is a Category II Treatment and Services Adaptation Center. The BRTRC's central aim is to develop, adapt, and disseminate trauma-informed care (TIC) approaches and evidence-based practices (EBPs) for residential treatment centers (RTCs) nationwide that serve high risk, trauma-impacted youth and their families. The BRTRC's mission is to address key gaps in available strategies for implementation of TIC in RTCs, increase access to effective EBPs for youth in residential care, and bolster workforce development in RTCs. Through these activities, the BRTRC will raise the standard of care, increase resiliency of programs, staff and clients, and improve client clinical outcomes. The primary goals of the BRTRC project are: (1) wide scale dissemination, implementation and sustainability of Building Communities of Care (BCC), a trauma and evidenced informed, strengths based model designed to address the unique needs of RTCs, through training and TA with all staff (front line, clinical, educational, medical, administrative); (2) to increase access to EBPs for trauma in RTCs serving trauma-impacted youth through intensive training and technical assistance in EBPs that have demonstrated effectiveness with YRC, including Attachment, Regulation, and Competency (ARC), Trauma Focused CBT (TF-CBT), and Structured Psychotherapy for Adolescents Responding to Chronic Stress (SPARCS); and (3) to build a trauma-informed workforce in RTCs through education, training and technical assistance via both intensive RTC partnerships and national dissemination activities. The BRTRC expert staff provide intensive training and technical assistance to RTCs across the nation.
Justice Resource Institute - Metropolitan Boston Complex Trauma Treatment Initiative
The Metropolitan Boston Complex Trauma Treatment Initiative (MB-CTTI) is a mobile service network delivering evidence-based trauma interventions to high-risk and underserved complex trauma-exposed children and youth ages 0-21 living in the Metropolitan Boston region. There are several groups of children and youth that we are prioritizing for services in this project, including trafficked and exploited youth, youth in state custody, LGBTQ youth, youth from military families, and urban youth of color. The primary aim of the MB-CTTI is to reduce behavioral health disparities among these consumer groups. The work of the MB-CTTI includes delivery of clinical services, including individual and family therapy, to children, youth, and their families, as well as consultation and training to programs partners. We deliver trauma-informed interventions, consultation, and training to a range of service settings, including outpatient, community based, and residential settings. A central goal of the MB-CTTI is to enhance the infrastructure and capacities of program partners in order to support sustainability of trauma EBPs over time.