Child First will create a national Center for Prevention and Early Trauma Treatment (CPETT), which will address persistent gaps in prevention, identification, reflective consultation, early intervention, and treatment for very young children and families exposed to trauma and adversity. The evidence-based, two-generation Child First (CF) model will be replicated and serve young children (prenatal-5) and families with the highest levels of traumatic stress and concrete challenges. It employs a two-pronged approach with home-based teams, consisting of a licensed mental health clinician and a care coordinator, to 1) decrease multiple environmental stressors through intensive care coordination, while building parental executive functioning and 2) establish a nurturing, responsive parent-child relationship, which heals trauma and enhances resilience. To help facilitate a comprehensive system of care, CPETT will train a diverse array of early childhood mental health providers in a range of other diagnostic and therapeutic modalities, including Child-Parent Psychotherapy, Circle of Security, and Diagnostic Classification: 0-5. CPETT will adapt CF’s extensive training curriculum to create a new, web-based Early Childhood Mental Health Trauma Training. We will also offer in-person/virtual training and reflective clinical consultation groups to multiple providers, including home visiting, early care and education, pediatrics, and child welfare. Our goal is to create a trauma-informed community in which all providers understand the impact of trauma on young children; increase development-enhancing, trauma-informed practices; identify children needing further treatment; and refer to relationship-based therapeutic interventions that address mental health needs and heal trauma.
Child First, Inc.
Child Health and Development Institute
The Child Health and Development Institute’s (CHDI) mission is to ensure healthy outcomes for children by advancing effective policies, stronger systems, and innovative practices. CHDI functions as an intermediary organization in collaboration with treatment developers, researchers, state agencies, community-based providers, legislators, family advocacy organizations, and others to promote sustainable improvements to children’s health and behavioral health systems and services. CHDI’s ScreenTIME (Screen, Triage, Inform, Mitigate, Engage) project will improve early identification and support of children suffering from traumatic stress and connection to evidence-based treatment. ScreenTIME will develop and disseminate online trainings in screening best practices tailored for schools, primary care, early childhood, child welfare, and juvenile justice staff. The overall goal is to improve identification of children suffering from trauma as early as possible and connect them with support and services as needed. The primary activities of ScreenTIME will be to 1) create and disseminate interactive online trainings in screening best practices for staff in child-serving systems; 2) ensure all materials represent and support child and family input; and 3) disseminate these resources nationally through the NCTSN.
Child HELP Partnership at St. John's University
The Center will train and support the delivery of evidence-based, culturally adapted trauma services and interventions for children exposed to disaster, sexual abuse, family violence, race-based and immigration trauma (e.g., unaccompanied minors), COVID-19, and traumatic deaths. Major stakeholders in children’s mental health–school personnel, parents, and mental health providers–will work in partnership to create a continuum-of-care at 18 sites nationwide. The Center aims to serve underserved children (ages 4-17) from culturally diverse backgrounds (e.g., people of color, LGBTQ+) who have been exposed to trauma and are experiencing diverse mental health responses. Each site’s trauma team will have representatives from schools, parents, youth, mental health clinics, and other social systems (e.g., police) and be responsible for implementing a tiered approach to services and interventions. Tier 1 is system-level psychoeducation (i.e., Trauma 101) to create a trauma-informed culture and provide a foundation for trauma EBIs. Tier 2 is early intervention delivered after trauma (i.e., Skills for Psychological Recovery) to prevent the development of mental disorders. Tier 3 is treatment for traumatized children and their caregivers (i.e., Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Alternatives for Families-A Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy). After being trained and implementing the interventions, school counselors and mental health supervisors will participate in train-the-trainer programs to train others (e.g., teachers, clinicians).
Clifford Beers
Clifford Beers (CB), a 107 year old institution providing trauma informed mental health services for children and adults throughout the lifespan has been strategically growing its whole family, trauma informed integrated care, model of care designed to reduce chronic stress. Focusing our work on the systemic and structural changes related to the delivery of mental health services, this project proposes to develop and implement and infuse anti-racist training in our model of care, developing a tool kit for replication of Trauma Informed Anti-Racist (TIAR) Whole Family Approach to Care. The main purpose of the project is to integrate whole family anti-racist thinking and social determinants of health perspective in trauma-informed service system design, to ensure the trauma treatments are responsive to inequity, sensitive to systemic racism and care is contextualized to the needs of the people served.
Coalition for Compassionate Schools
Our goals are to: 1) Increase the capacity of New Orleans K – 8 public schools to implement and sustain a trauma-informed, healing-centered service delivery model to improve outcomes for youth exposed to trauma and prevent new exposure in schools; 2) Expand implementation of our model to afterschool programs and coordinate training and consultation across service systems to support service providers and youth affected by traumatic events; and 3) Develop additional products to support a trauma-informed, healing-centered service delivery model and provide training, consultation, and implementation support for the replication and dissemination of our model to schools across the country.
Collective for Antiracist Child and Family Systems
The Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress at Kennedy Krieger Institute and the University of Maryland School of Social Work will establish an NCTSI Category II TSA center, the Collective for Antiracist Child and Family Systems (CACFS), to transform child and family-serving systems by supporting organizations and providers to adopt antiracist, anti-oppressive practices to prevent trauma exposure and repair trauma effects among Black and Latinx children, youth, and families. Target population: CACFS will train and support human services providers, including social workers and mental health clinicians, supervisors, and administrators, from child and family serving organizations and systems, including child welfare agencies. Strategies/ Interventions: The CACFS will develop, model, and expand the implementation of three culturally responsive trauma approaches, SHARP, Radical Healing, and HEART. Goals and objectives: CACFS will: (1) expand the knowledge base for, and increase the number of organizations working to reduce trauma in Black/African American and Latinx children by effectively institutionalizing antiracist, anti-oppressive practices; and (2) address behavioral health disparities by developing and promoting antiracist, anti-oppressive trauma-informed care approaches, to support Black/African American and Latinx children and families to heal from trauma by engaging providers to increase knowledge and skills, and adopt new practices; and organizations to increase readiness for and/or commit to adopting practices, policies, and strategic plans that centralize racial equity and healing.
Cornell University
The high prevalence of traumatic exposure among the 56,000 youth in residential care requires provision of high-quality trauma-informed care to help address the high rates of functional impairments among these youth. The Creating Trauma Informed Residential Settings Center, located in Cornell University’s Residential Child Care Project (RCCP), will increase the reach and quality of trauma-informed services in residential settings by expanding the use of two milieu-wide, organization-level interventions developed by RCCP: Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) and Children and Residential Experiences (CARE). TCI is a trauma-informed crisis prevention and management system; CARE is a principle-based, multi-component, trauma-informed program model designed to transform the residential care setting by enhancing the social dynamics through targeted staff development and ongoing reflective practice. Specific goals of the Center are to: 1) Facilitate implementation and sustainability of the milieu-wide TCI and CARE interventions through development and dissemination of materials and processes that support high-quality, trauma-informed practices (e.g. procedures for data-informed decision making and monitoring; communities of practice for collaborative learning); 2) Provide a national platform for advocating and advancing the use of trauma informed practices in residential settings (e.g. dissemination of information and resources about trauma informed care through a website, in person networking and educational opportunities, and publications); and 3) Provide leadership and expertise in the NCTSN in assessing and applying trauma-informed practices in setting-level crisis prevention and management systems and program models in residential settings.
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Child Resilience Center
Deaf and hard of hearing children and youth are typically at a higher risk for trauma exposure than the general child population due to the unique trauma experienced from everyday communication barriers. Yet, the number of trauma-informed and linguistically accessible treatments and mental health measures for deaf and hard of hearing remain severely limited. We're here to change that. The Deaf and Hard of Hearing Child Resilience Center was created to address the gap between children who have experienced trauma and the mental health services they deserve. We've developed a multi-tier approach to improve the outcome of services and to eliminate health disparities for traumatized deaf children, adolescents, and their families. The goals our center is focused around adapting and translating child behavioral and trauma measures, developing a new screening measure of language deprivation, adapting evidence-based treatments, and providing training and ongoing consultation for clinicians.
Family Centered Treatment Foundation, Inc.
The Family Centered Treatment Foundation (FCTF) is the nationally recognized provider of the evidence-based Family Centered Treatment (FCT). The primary purpose of the Family Centered Treatment - Trauma Series Project is to enhance evidenced-based family-systems trauma treatment and increase access to its availability to ensure high-quality treatment for families from a wide range of populations. The NREPP registered FCT model has a strong trauma focus embedded both in the theoretical framework and design and in the practical application. The service delivery system of FCT includes the public sectors of child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health, and substance abuse. Male and female populations of all ages are included with histories or current involvement in Mental Health, Substance Abuse, Developmental Disabilities, Juvenile Justice systems, military families, families living in impoverished and high-risk communities. The FCT model recognizes the importance of having a cultural and contextual understanding to the traumatic experiences of youth and their families in order to effectively treat all populations, including disadvantaged groups disproportionately affected by trauma. Thus, the goals of the project are to 1) enhance and expand FCT to better serve families of complex trauma; 2) Extend the access to FCT for families/victims of complex trauma in the identified states and additional states; and 3) advance the awareness and access of FCT nationally for trauma centers. Expanding availability and implementation of trauma treatment through training programs to current FCT sites are expected to incrementally impact 1,440 families annually in 9 states and expanding training to additional sites and states serving 7,200 families over the course of the project.
Family Service of Rhode Island/Victim Services
Family Service of Rhode Island's (FSRI) mission is to advance equity, opportunity, and hope in our communities. We believe all children and families have limitless potential. But for those growing up surrounded by poverty, family instability, and physical or emotional stress, life is too often about survival, not possibility. FSRI responds alongside police to provide crisis response to victims at crime scenes, offering crisis intervention, stabilization, language support, and service referral. In addition to crime victims, the Police Partnership program assists homeless individuals, wayward juveniles, people with mental health or substance use issues, and others in crisis. The program also helps prevent crime by defusing community conflicts. Family Service of Rhode Island, the Roger Williams University Justice System Training and Research Institute and the Institute for Intergovernmental Research will create a Center for Trauma-Informed Policing to improve outcomes for traumatized children encountered on crime scenes. A state-of-the-art, virtual law enforcement training program will be developed and the FSRI Go Team police/mental health partnership program will be formally evaluated. A Project Advisory Committee including child trauma experts, law enforcement, clinicians, and family with lived experience will advise on all project activities. Following a New England-based pilot to test the initial training and technical assistance program and two Learning Communities involving police departments across the country to improve upon and refine the program and related intervention products, the final trauma-informed law enforcement Learning Management System (LMS) will be launched and broadly disseminated.