This document discusses trauma-informed care and how organizations can implement it. Trauma results from distressing events that make one feel powerless, fearful, and disconnected from others. Trauma-informed care recognizes how trauma impacts people and aims to avoid re-traumatization. It involves ensuring physical and emotional safety, building trust, providing clear information, maintaining appropriate boundaries, giving choice and control to clients, and collaborating with them as equals rather than judging them. The document provides examples of how intake processes and services could unintentionally re-traumatize clients and asks participants to suggest better trauma-informed alternatives.

1. Trauma-Informed Care Public Allies Leadership Training April 15 th , 2011

2. Trauma Traumatic experiences can be dehumanizing, shocking or terrifying, singular or multiple compounding events over time, and often include betrayal of a trusted person or institution and a loss of safety. Trauma includes physical, sexual and institutional abuse, neglect, intergenerational trauma, and disasters that induce powerlessness, fear, recurrent hopelessness, and a constant state of alert. Trauma impacts one's spirituality and relationships with self, others, communities and environment, often resulting in recurring feelings of shame, guilt, rage, isolation, and disconnection.

3. Trauma-Informed Care Trauma-informed care is an approach to engaging people with histories of trauma that recognizes the presence of trauma symptoms and acknowledges the role that trauma has played in their lives.

4. What does this mean for an organization… Trauma-informed organizations, programs, and services are based on an understanding of the vulnerabilities or triggers of trauma survivors that traditional service delivery approaches may exacerbate, so that these services and programs can be more supportive and avoid re-traumatization. Remember that… Trauma affects the way people approach potentially helpful relationships Trauma has often occurred in the service context itself.

5. Key Elements of Trauma-Informed Practice…

6. Activity 1 Think about the services that your organization offers and how a client utilizing those services could potentially be re-traumatized. Write down some examples. Example: A client walks into a homeless shelter and is immediately handed a form to fill out that includes personal information such as why the client is homeless. After filling out the paperwork, the client is guided to the bed for the night and greeted by the employee with a sarcastic remark “Back again!”

7. Discussion Questions How can we ensure physical and emotional safety for consumers and staff? How can we maximize trustworthiness? Make tasks clear? Maintain appropriate boundaries? How can we enhance consumer choice and control? How can we maximize collaboration and sharing of power with consumers?

8. In all of these environments, we want to change the paradigm from one that asks, "What's wrong with you?" to one that asks, "What has happened to you?"

9. Activity 2 Use one of the examples in your group to create a skit that models trauma-informed care when serving clients.