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Becoming Healing-Centered: Organizations

After learning about PACEs Science, most people ask, “What can I do?” The good news is that there are so many steps that we can take to become healing-centered! Action may involve engaging at individual, organizational, community, or policy levels.

Child Welfare

Child Welfare

  • Advancing California's Trauma-Informed Systems (ACTS)

    The ACTS project has consolidated what we know about TIC from the existing empirical literature and created a framework to guide trauma-informed change approaches. The resources on this page offer current, evidence-informed, and trauma focused resources geared towards child-welfare and mental-health professionals at all levels. 

  • Building a Trauma-Informed Child Welfare System (CONCEPT), 2016
    Connecticut has made significant progress to ensure that trauma-informed care is part of its child welfare system. This issue brief relates to CONCEPT, The Connecticut Collaborative on Effective Practices for Trauma.
     
  • Center for the Study of Social Policy
    We work to ensure that child welfare systems—including juvenile justice and homeless agencies—are data-informed; adopt best practices and use research to shape their services; confront inequities and offer an array of culturally relevant and effective services; and are equipped to meet the complex needs of families in humane ways. We work in partnership with public agencies, private providers, elected officials, parents, judges, advocates, and a broad range of community supporters to develop, test, and promote approaches that help improve child welfare policy and practice—all aimed at child and youth safety, permanency, and well-being. The website includes information about projects, policy, publications, and resources.
     
  • Creating a Child & Family Well-Being System: A Paradigm Shift from Mandated Reporting to Community Supporting, 2022
    The proposed paradigm shift from mandated reporting to community supporting is not a new idea, but one that has been proposed and championed by advocates, social workers, researchers, philanthropists, pediatricians, educators, and others across the country who have been informed by deep listening to families with lived expertise in the child welfare system. This brief from Safe and Sound offers action steps in five categories: 
    • Embrace a new frame, 
    • Advance legal and legislative reforms 
    • Implement policy and practice reforms
    • Increase access to supports and services
    • Engage communities, tribes, and other stakeholders to guide reform
       
  • Guidance for CDR and FIMR Teams on Addressing Vicarious Trauma, 2016
    All partners engaged in the Fetal Infant Mortality Review (FIMR) or Child Death Review (CDR) process, either individually or on a team, can be adversely affected by the repeated exposure to traumatic information. The goal of this guidance is to serve as a resource on vicarious trauma that can be utilized by fatality review leadership, staff, and team members to address the vicarious trauma that can result from exposure to child deaths.
     
  • Guides for How to Incorporate Co-Regulation with Older Youth in Foster Care, 2022
    These guides from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, provide tips on how caring adults can engage youth in supportive conversations in many different ways, depending on the situation and the young person’s needs.
     
  • Secondary Traumatic Stress in Child Welfare Practice: Trauma-Informed Guidelines for Organizations, 2016
    The Chadwick Center for Children & Families at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego has developed a set of trauma-informed guidelines with concrete strategies for approaching secondary traumatic stress (STS). While these guidelines were created for intended use within child welfare systems, they may be easily adapted into other child-and family-serving organizations. The guidelines highlight strategies and approaches to STS throughout four phases in the life of a child welfare worker (or other child-and family-serving professional), including the hiring phase, first 3 months on the job, the cumulative effect over time, and critical incidents.
     

  • The upEND Movement is a collaborative movement that works to abolish the existing child welfare system, which is built on a model of surveillance and separation and more accurately described as a family policing system. Explore resources, videos, and events on the site.