Trauma-Informed Care in Champaign County

[UPDATE: Additional information on this issue, including about training and work being done in local schools, from the Illinois Newsroom journalism collaboration. Here's an excerpt:

How Schools Can Help Kids Traumatized By Gun Violence
...
But to most effectively improve the lives of youth affected by trauma, Simms said schools, police departments, businesses and local governments should be working together to implement these strategies, to model positive social behavior and provide supportive adult relationships for all children.

“If we don’t have a more collaborative approach to do this work that’s based on science and based on recovery we will leave significant numbers of students behind,” Simms said. “We’re in a state of emergency.”

Argue says building awareness around the science that supports this approach is the first step. But the time it’s taking to do that worries her, too.

“While we’re trying to pull people together, while we’re trying to convince people this is real and it’s not going anywhere, there are tragedies. I mean that figuratively and literally. It scares me,” she said.

But if communities do the work to address these unmet needs, she said, they can steer children away from health problems, prison and early death toward more fulfilling, healthy and productive lives.

Full article with more information here.]

One of the things that comes up a lot with programs addressing social issues is attempting to find the underlying factors and addressing them to help break cycles with negative results. Trauma is believed to play a major role in this and addressing it is part of the work of many right here in our community as well. From the News-Gazette yesterday:

Local group educating others in trauma-informed care
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A practice known as trauma-informed care recognizes how a person's actions stem from those roots, said Simms, coordinator of CU Peace and Resiliency Champions. She said she likes to think of it as not asking what's wrong with someone but instead asking what happened to them — especially in childhood...

Although the concept of trauma-informed care isn't new, especially among researchers, it has been gaining traction among lawmakers and the general public...

Simms said that when trauma isn't acknowledged among school officials, money and effort can go toward programs that would be more effective if a student's trauma was identified and treated first. She also noted that mental health professionals can misdiagnose patients if they're not looking out for possible trauma.

To bring those messages and more to the community, CU Peace and Resiliency Champions provides various seminars and training sessions for anyone to attend. There's the basics course, "When Trauma Hits Home," which once was held to address December's shooting that wounded three outside Champaign Central High School.

There's also "Healing Solutions," for which attendees receive certification after going for 40 hours. A Healing Solutions session on Thursday night received attendees affiliated with the Urbana School District, the Unit 4 School District PTA and the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission.

More at the full article here. More information and links at the Champaign Community Coalition Trauma Resiliency page and the facebook page for CU Peace and Resiliency Champions.

[Originally posted 5/12/2018 at 10:01pm]