The Health Foundation for Western and Central New York awarded a $10,000 grant to a team from a cohort of the Health Leadership Fellows program to continue and expand efforts to advocate for policies supporting trauma informed care in western New York.
Trauma Informed Care is an intervention and organizational approach and treatment framework that involves understanding, recognizing and responding to the effects of all types of trauma.
This work builds on a project initiated by a team in the first cohort of Health Leadership Fellows in 2005 and continued by a team from the fifth cohort to transform western New York into a Trauma Informed Community through training and policy development.
As part of this project, the team will train Trauma Informed Care Champions during a seven-month learning collaborative starting in spring 2017. The goal is for the champions to help create trauma-informed agencies in their communities and advocate for local policy on trauma informed care, including sponsoring resolutions at the local and county level.
States such as Alaska, California, Pennsylvania and Vermont have all taken steps to encourage and support trauma informed care to reduce children’s exposure to adverse childhood experience, take a public health approach to violence, address the impacts of those experiences, invest in preventative care, and in some cities, become fully Trauma Informed Communities.
The Institute on Trauma and Trauma-Informed Care and a team of Health Leadership Fellows will identify 30 champions from across the eight counties of Western New York to attend and participate in all components of the learning collaborative; to implement changes in their agencies; to train and coach other staff and to commit to policy advocacy efforts in their local communities.
If you are interested in learning more about becoming a TIC Champion, please contact Helen Evans at by email at evansh@ardentnetwork.org
