Building a Trauma Informed Care Approach for Afterschool Programs & Community-based Organizations

Source: Afterschool Alliance

Many of the young people we work with in afterschool have suffered from individual or collective trauma. Below we share a blog from the Afterschool Alliance entitled, Building a trauma informed care approach for afterschool programs & community-based organizations, by Jennifer Smith, afterschool program manager at the Center for Community Health Advancement, Marshfield Clinic Health System.

“Recently, schools, afterschool programs, and community-based organizations have shared the increasing numbers of disruptive and challenging youth in their programs. Developed in 2018, the Wisconsin Afterschool Network has been part of the solution by providing the Trauma Informed Care course, designed to elevate the level of programming provided to youth by helping staff learn how to understand, address, and mitigate that behavior — with practical recommendations for every day on-site use.

Trauma Informed Care Principles (adapted from Wisconsin Department of Human Services and Department of Public Instruction) include:

• Safety – An environment where kids feel physically, emotionally, and culturally safe; helps kids regulate and fosters relationship building. Important components of this are staff to youth ratios and physical space. Fifty youth with two adult leaders in a large open area does not create an environment of safety; smaller ratios and access to soft, comfortable spaces creates a safer environment and helps to support youth’s ability to better regulate.
• Trustworthiness – Programming is predictable and consistent; youth know what to expect when arriving at the program. Staff “walk the talk” to alleviate any fear or anxiety that may be created by the unknown.
• Choice – Abuse and neglect are experiences which steal an individual’s autonomy and ability to make choices for oneself. Providing opportunities for youth to have choice within programming (youth can choose from activity options) and choice in directives (it’s homework time, you can sit at the table or grab a clipboard and go to the rug) can help fill that void. These choices allow for autonomy while giving youth multiple options to get to where it is we want them to go (getting out their homework).
• Collaboration – The understanding that learning happens in relationships; staff who intentionally work to make all youth feel like they belong and help youth to develop new skills allows for greater social-emotional learning. In addition, supporting parents and working with other agencies (such as schools, therapists, or social workers) builds a net of support for youth.
• Empowerment – The lifting up of youth’s strengths and an understanding that troubling behavior patterns have served the youth in some capacity. Acknowledging the behaviors they have developed and helping them reframe those behaviors can be an incredibly powerful message. The idea that “sassy” is the strength of advocating for your needs and helping youth to find more successful ways to exercise those strengths is empowering and more likely to illicit skill development than rewards or punishment.

Building Staff Capacity
A significant portion of the coursework also asks staff to do some self-reflection. We encourage staff to ask questions like

• How regulated are you?
• Are you modeling behaviors you would like to see reflected by youth?
• How did you learn your social-emotional skills?

Social-emotional learning is a lifelong journey. Adults modeling their own learning by openly articulating their thought process when trying to solve a problem, or talking about how they are managing challenging emotions, can be transformative for youth —particularly youth whose familial models may not have strong social-emotional skills themselves. All social-emotional learning happens through modeling and observation, along with reinforcement at the right times.

As extra-familial adults in the lives of youth, we can be a strong influence through our modeling and reinforcement of social-emotional skills. For example, do you yell across the room to redirect youth, or do you respectfully approach youth who may need some behavior guidance and ask them what is going on and how you can help? Along with the understanding of the importance of social-emotional learning is the notion that challenging behavior is often the result of a lack of skill. A child who becomes upset and acts out often doesn’t have the ability to more skillfully manage their emotions; this provides an opportunity for guidance and learning rather than a time for punishment. The lens through which we view children who have challenging behaviors shifts, making us more empathic and more likely to take the time to slow down and help kids understand and manage their feelings more effectively.”

 

MORE ABOUT...

Jennifer Smith has been with Marshfield Clinic Health System since 2014.  She has worked in spaces supporting children and adolescents for over 25 years.  Jennifer began as a public-school teacher, transitioned to a community-based youth program and now supports out-of-school time programs and program staff throughout the state of Wisconsin in her work with the Wisconsin Out of School Time Alliance. Jennifer has worked in spaces supporting children and adolescents for over 25 years.  Jennifer began as a public-school teacher, transitioned to a community-based youth program and now supports out-of-school time programs and program staff throughout the state of Wisconsin in her work with the Wisconsin Out of School Time Alliance.  

Wisconsin Out of School Time Alliance (WOSTA), a program of the Marshfield Clinic Region of Sanford Health, is dedicated to fostering quality out-of-school time (OST) programming across Wisconsin. They believe in the transformative power of OST programs to positively impact the lives of children and families in our communities. 

Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement


By Sam Piha

Photo Credit: Medium.com

Shawn Ginwright is a university professor, author, activist, and youth program leader. He is also a leading voice in the expanded learning field, deepening our understanding of new concepts and frameworks by bringing in the importance of context, culture, and race. 


Dr. Ginwright recently authored an article entitled Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement. Below we offer a few excerpts from his article and urge everyone to read it in its entirety.


“Practitioners and policy stakeholders have recognized the impact of trauma on learning, and healthy development. Trauma informed care broadly refers to a set of principles that guide and direct how we view the impact of severe harm on young people’s mental, physical and emotional health. Trauma informed care encourages support and treatment to the whole person, rather than focus on only treating individual symptoms or specific behaviors.

While trauma informed care offers an important lens to support young people who have been harmed and emotionally injured, it also has its limitations. For me, I realized the term slipped into the murky water of deficit based, rather than asset driven strategies to support young people who have been harmed. Without careful consideration of the terms we use, we can create blind spots in our efforts to support young people.”

Dr. Shawn Ginwright

He goes on to explain how current formulations of trauma informed care presumes that the trauma is an individual experience, rather than a collective one:

“To illustrate this point, researchers have shown that children in high violence neighborhoods all display behavioral and psychological elements of trauma…


Second, trauma informed care requires that we treat trauma in people but provides very little insight into how we might address the root causes of trauma in neighborhoods, families, and schools. If trauma is collectively experienced, this means that we also have to consider the environmental context that caused the harm in the first place. By only treating the individual we only address half of the equation leaving the toxic systems, policies and practices neatly intact.


Third, the term trauma informed care runs the risk of focusing on the treatment of pathology (trauma), rather than fostering the possibility (well-being). What is needed is an approach that allows practitioners to approach trauma with a fresh lens which promotes a holistic view of healing from traumatic experiences and environments. One approach is called healing centered, as opposed to trauma informed. A healing centered approach is holistic involving culture, spirituality, civic action and collective healing. A healing centered approach views trauma not simply as an individual isolated experience, but rather highlights the ways in which trauma and healing are experienced collectively.”


Dr. Ginwright goes on to offer some thoughts on practice and policy: “Shifting from trauma informed care or treatment to healing centered engagement requires youth development stakeholders to expand from a treatment based model which views trauma and harm as an isolated experience, to an engagement model which supports collective well-being. Here are a few notes to consider in building healing centered engagement.

• Start by building empathy.

Healing centered engagement begins by building empathy with young people who experience trauma... However, building empathy is critical to healing centered engagement. To create this empathy, I encourage adult staff to share their story first, and take an emotional risk by being more vulnerable, honest and open to young people. 


Fostering empathy allows for young people to feel safe sharing their experiences and emotions. The process ultimately restores their sense of well-being because they have the power name and respond to their emotional states.

• Encourage young people to dream and imagine!

An important ingredient in healing centered engagement is the ability to acknowledge the harm and injury, but not be defined by it. Perhaps one of the greatest tools available to us is the ability to see beyond the condition, event or situation that caused the trauma in the first place.

Research shows that the ability to dream and imagine is an important factor to foster hopefulness, and optimism both of which contributes to overall well-being. Daily survival and ongoing crisis management in young people’s lives make it difficult to see beyond the present. The greatest casualty of trauma is not only depression and emotional scares, but also the loss of the ability to dream and imagine another way of living.


By creating activities and opportunities for young people to play, reimagine, design and envision their lives this process strengthens their future goal orientation. These are practices of possibility that encourage young people to envision what they want to become, and who they want to be.

• Build critical reflection and take loving action.

Healing and well-being are fundamentally political not clinical. This means that we have to consider the ways in which the policies and practice and political decisions harm young people. Healing in this context also means that young people develop an analysis of these practices and policies that facilitated the trauma in the first place. Without an analysis of these issues, young people often internalize, and blame themselves for lack of confidence. Critical reflection provides a lens by which to filter, examine, and consider analytical and spiritual responses to trauma. 


The other key component, is taking loving action, by collectively responding to political decisions and practices that can exacerbate trauma. By taking action, (e.g. school walkouts, organizing peace march, or promoting access to healthy foods) it builds a sense of power and control over their lives. Research has demonstrated that building this sense of power and control among traumatized groups is perhaps one of the most significant features in restoring holistic well-being.”

Dr. Ginwright has spoken at three of our How Kids Learn conferences. You can view his presentations here: 


HKL 1, part 1

HKL 1, part 2

HKL 4

HKL 6 

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Dr. Shawn Ginwright is Associate Professor of Education, and African American Studies at San Francisco State University and the author of Hope and Healing in Urban Education: How Activists are Reclaiming Matters of the Heart.