Project assist (access, skills, and support for implementation science in trauma-informed training) - project assist will serve a population essential to improving outcomes for children exposed to…

Project assist (access, skills, and support for implementation science in trauma-informed training) - project assist will serve a population essential to improving outcomes for children exposed to traumatic events: trainers of trauma-informed treatment models, practices, and products. Project assist will implement a series of innovative trainer-enhancement learning cohorts, equip trainers with a suite of best-practice guidelines and training materials, and support training professionals through robust communities of practice. While effective training is key to increasing capacity for trauma-informed interventions, available trainers are inundated with a volume of training requests they cannot accommodate. Relatedly, trainers, regardless of their affiliation with a specific evidence-based intervention, rarely have formal education in topics that would increase the likelihood that their training efforts will result in sustainable changes to service delivery: general principles related to adult learning, engagement skills, implementation science strategies, or best practices for using online/virtual technology tools. The educational and practice components of project assist will be applicable and generalizable to any trauma-informed treatment model, practice, or product enabling project assist trainers to train 39,000 child-serving workforce members across multiple systems. The university of missouri-ST. Louis will build on numerous successes of cross-system, innovative trauma-informed training and dissemination experience in both face-to-face and virtual environments to accomplish three primary goals. The first: to increase child-serving professionals' access to competent trauma-informed trainers. To accomplish this, we will train 200 participants in trainer enhancement learning cohorts and prepare 80 facilitators to implement problem based learning-simulations with targeted efforts to recruit 50 of those trainers from underrepresented minority groups. We will also build infrastructure to connect communities with trainers, leading trainers to report year over year increases in trainings delivered to individuals and organizations thereby increasing overall access to trauma-informed interventions. Our second goal is to improve the virtual and face-to-face training skills for trauma-informed trainers in child-serving systems. Cohorts of project assist trainers will increase their training skill, confidence, and quality through mastery of best practice training tools and resources. Finally, project assist will support trauma-informed trainers through four robust communities of practice. Members of these networks will have access to peer support for training and evaluation efforts, a specialized mentoring program for underrepresented minority trainers, facilitated linkages with training requests and a resource repository that supports their training efforts. Implementation science principles will be embedded and evaluated throughout the project. Finally, an advisory board of child trauma experts, consumers with lived experience, and model developers will help develop curriculum and provide trainer feedback. We will conduct process and outcomes evaluations to demonstrate successful completion of our objectives.