Resilient communities: building a trauma-responsive system of care - the resilient communities: building a trauma-responsive system of care project will serve children and families from all…

Resilient communities: building a trauma-responsive system of care - the resilient communities: building a trauma-responsive system of care project will serve children and families from all backgrounds who have been impacted by any type of trauma with the aims of increasing access to evidence-based treatments, reducing health disparities, improving quality of life, and building community-wide resilience. Target subpopulations include children involved in the child welfare system or in foster/kinship care, as well as marginalized underserved populations (e.g., low-income, lgbtqia+, latinx, limited english/monolingual spanish speakers). The geographic catchment area includes boulder and broomfield counties in colorado. The project aims to serve a total of 13,345 children and families over the 5-year project period. Key goals include: (1) increase protective factors and reduce risk factors for children, youth, and families experiencing trauma or adversity by implementing sustainable, evidence-based, culturally responsive prevention services; (2) improve behavioral health outcomes, including trauma symptoms, for children, youth, and families by implementing and sustaining culturally responsive trauma-focused evidence-based practices (TF-EBPS); and (3) improve access to care and multisystem coordination for children, youth, and families by providing services to service systems, building efficient referral pathways, and ensuring culturally responsive systems. There is a clear need to increase access for families to the evidence-based treatments that directly link to positive youth outcomes, including targeted prevention and outreach efforts for marginalized populations. And because clients often present with multiple, CO-occurring forms of behavioral health challenges, clinicians must be equipped with the transdiagnostic approaches and core set of competencies proposed in this project that are empirically linked to clinical benefit to effectively help clients reduce risk, mobilize protective factors, and achieve positive outcomes. The targeted outreach and engagement strategies described in this proposal will promote the protective factors (e.g., parental support and warmth, responsivity, coping skills, social support), and reduce the risk factors that have far-reaching impact, including downstream prevention. This project will also take advantage of the rich opportunity to better meet community need by improving cross-system expertise through learning opportunities, community building, and strong referral pathway development for children- and family-serving partners. Resilient communities includes development of an innovative trauma-focused community health worker role to lead outreach, engagement, and stigma reduction activities that will build community and break down access barriers for marginalized populations.