This session will offer successful retention strategies, which are grounded in the power of employee engagement, to combat the growing issue of staff shortages. Presenters will focus on the research-based patterns and trends regarding workforce challenges that lead employees to leave an organization and offer strategies for leadership to embrace change, build in opportunities for growth, and make employees feel seen and heard. By engaging our employees in their work and driving our mission further, we can reduce workplace stress and burnout, while increasing job satisfaction. “Our People Matter” is not just an organizational tenet; our backgrounds and experiences directly influence the unique value we bring to our work and the communities we serve. It is crucial to create a safe space that allows us to learn about and celebrate our differences. Workshop participants will leave with a toolkit of takeaways that they can immediately apply to their role and their organization.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Jenny Livelli
President & CEO
The Children’s Guild

Elizabeth Garcia
Chief People Officer
The Children’s Guild

This session will explore the concept of trauma-informed performance management, an innovative approach that shifts the focus from solely client-centered care to prioritizing staff well-being. Participants will learn how to recognize and address the signs of trauma among staff members and understand the importance of creating a supportive work environment that fosters resilience and empowerment.

It will also address the challenges that arise when trauma-informed practices are misapplied, leading to staff burnout and organizational strain due to tolerance of poor performance. We will discuss strategies to maintain high-quality standards, while being sensitive to the personal experiences of employees. This includes setting clear expectations, providing constructive feedback, and ensuring that trauma-informed principles do not excuse unprofessional behavior, but rather guide the path to recovery and excellence.

By the end of this training, participants will be equipped with the tools to implement a balanced trauma-informed performance management system that upholds the organization’s mission and values without compromising on quality and accountability.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Kiera McGillivray
Chief Program Officer of School Based Initiatives
Co-Director of the Brain Science Training Institute
Children & Families First

Shannon Fisch
Director of Operations & Risk Management
Co-Director of the Brain Science Training Institute
Children & Families First

Human services organizations and their workforces are facing an unprecedented crisis. Burnout, turnover, and departures from direct services roles are at historic levels, just as the mental health needs of children, youth, and families have dramatically increased. The human and financial costs of these converging dynamics are impacting access and quality of preventative and interventional services across the country and forcing organizations to end or scale back much needed programs.

Research has shown there’s a strong connection between the culture and climate of child and family serving organizations and the implementation and impact of evidence-based practices and therapies. To address this crisis of need and the workforce, it’s time to consider a new frontier for promoting the health and well-being of clinicians, supervisors, and managers, as well as the possibilities of new therapies with children and families.

Evidence on the health benefits of nature connected wellness practices is growing rapidly. There’s a worldwide movement to connect people with nature through organized practices, such as forest and ecotherapy. In Asia, Europe, and Canada health insurers and physicians are prescribing time in nature in place of or prior to medication and talk therapy. The positive results on health and well-being have been profound and wide ranging. Practices such as Forest Therapy have been shown to boost the immune system, balance the heart rate, and lower cortisol levels, while also reducing anxiety and depression. Additionally, participants have reported increased levels of executive functioning, improved social emotional communication, and an enhanced ability to focus and manage conflict.

Birchwalking is a social impact organization founded and led by clinicians and leaders in the field of trauma-informed child and family services. In their work with nonprofit organizations and their government partners, they’re bringing evidence-based nature connected practices to human services professionals to promote workforce well-being, reduce burnout, and improve clinical service delivery. Results indicate staffs’ feel empowered by learning and experiencing these practices and report an improved attitude towards their work, colleagues, organizations, and clients. In one organization, the response from staff was so positive that its leadership invested in training a staff member to become a certified Forest Bathing Guide so that nature connected experiences can be regularly offered for staff and clients.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Amy Moore
Director of In-Home Care
Ascentria Care Alliance

Christine Tappan
Founder, Lead Guide
Birchwalking

Science is catching up with wisdom. For thousands of years, humans have recognized the power of somatic and embodied (SE) practices to support individual and collective well-being. And in recent years, advances in neuroscience have allowed us to better understand the neurobiology behind the healing and resilience-building that body-based approaches can offer.

In this session, we will go beyond the brain and explore why the entire nervous system and body are important to consider when developing a program or services and when developing an organizational culture that is trauma-informed and healing-centered. Facilitators and participants will build a shared understanding of stress and trauma, as well as key components and functions of the nervous system. We will also examine models, such as the polyvagal theory, to help understand the connection between our bodies and mental/emotional health.

Participants will discuss foundational SE practices, and the session will offer a space to practice with some of these simple strategies. Participants will also reflect on which embodied practices might be most supportive to their own well-being at work, as well as what approaches can best contribute to workforce wellbeing in their teams and organizations.

Additionally, facilitators will engage in discussion around the connections between SE approaches and anti-oppression work. Specifically, this conversation will center around how mind-body practices can help uproot and unlearn unconscious biases and how embodiment is a strategy for sustainability in equity, diversity, and inclusion and antiracism work.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Kelly Martin
Director of Practice Excellence
Social Current

Karen Johnson
Senior Director of Change in Mind
Social Current

Creating a trauma-informed, healing-oriented organization is a complex process that requires more than just understanding trauma. Organizations must go beyond that and foster a culture of healing that enables communities to flourish. To create transformative, trauma-informed, and healing-oriented environments, organizations must not only train their workforce but also embed it into the culture, practices, and external partnerships. This is a challenging task, especially in the face of changes in the social sector, the aftermath of the pandemic, and the growing pressures on the workforce.

Successful organizations understand the importance of connecting trauma-informed transformation to equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives. They foster values and competencies that empower leadership at all levels and facilitate the healing process within the communities they serve. Rather than settling for a trauma-informed culture, they strive to make healing the core of their trauma-informed culture within the organization.

Creating a healing-oriented culture has many benefits, such as increased employee satisfaction, improved client outcomes, and better community engagement. However, organizations might face challenges when trying to create such a culture, such as resistance to change, lack of resources, or difficulty measuring progress.

Empowering your staff to take the lead in driving and maintaining the trauma-informed movement and ensuring its long-term viability is crucial. We will share our experience of implementing and sustaining this change for over five years, and provide you with the best practices we learned for keeping this transformation alive and dynamic. Our experience has shown that it is essential to connect trauma-informed transformation to equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives to create a healing-oriented culture.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Corina Casco
Chief Program Officer
Children’s Bureau

In this workshop, Starr Commonwealth will discuss the integration of trauma-informed, sensory-based occupational therapy into behavioral health therapy via the “co-treatment approach.” This specialized approach enhances the developmentally appropriate, play-based tactics that help young children who have experienced trauma heal. This session will include discussion and demonstrations of activities conducted to assist participants in understanding the foundations of this specialized approach as well as how the developmentally informed strategies appear in practice.

Check out this article, authored by presenters Jenny Sloan and Sara Gariepy, referencing these practices in the Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Jenny Sloan, LMSW CTRT CTP-C
Clinical Supervisor
Starr Commonwealth

Sara Sulkowski
Behavioral Health Clinician
Starr Commonwealth

Sara Gariepy
Occupational Therapist
Starr Commonwealth

An organization’s ability to provide quality care and services is completely dependent on its ability to care for, equip, and retain its team members. The Buckeye Ranch serves families across a broad continuum of care with multiple, diverse service lines. Since the early 2000s, they’ve established organization-wide standards for serving families through the implementation of their principles of quality care, which are: Strength based, family centered, trauma informed, and culturally responsive. Their understanding of trauma’s impact on the brain has informed the care model and given them a scientific lens through which to implement the principles in their work. As increased turnover and a growing workforce crisis threatened their capacity to provide quality care, they turned attention to the application of these principles as well as the corresponding neuroscience to their team members.

The Buckeye Ranch’s 2020 strategic plan included investments in a deliberate approach toward operationalizing and applying these principles in working with their employees. This effort involved an expansion of their understanding of social-neuroscience to inform the creation of work environments that are not only trauma informed, but also strength based, family centered, and culturally responsive. They have taken a multi-pronged approach to this work, which includes: Restructuring the organization to make professional development a priority, intensive focus on supervisor and manager development, strategic investments in understanding and utilizing team member strengths, and deep dives into organizational self-reflection as well as resource allocation toward culturally respectful responses with their staff. In this presentation, they will offer a brief overview of the brain science informing this work and key strategic initiatives designed to increase employee well-being.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Pamela Scott
Director of Professional and Clinical Development
The Buckeye Ranch

Kimberly Miller
Executive Vice President of Innovative Strategies
The Buckeye Ranch

Kristina Knight
Trauma-Informed Care Administrator
The Buckeye Ranch

Come and play Getting By, the game that puts your brain into poverty. You will see how your own thinking and decision making respond to scarcity. After playing, you will learn the basics of brain science. You will understand what some take for granted (give no thought to) and how that differs for people and children coping with poverty. With so many things crowding the brain, people in poverty respond to certain kinds of communication and not others. In this workshop, you will learn how to listen and respond effectively, improving your work with low-income children and families.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Linda Riddell
Founder
Health Economy LLC

Chad Dull
Principal Consultant / CEO
Poverty Informed Practice LLC

What does it look like to align brain science and race equity and embed both into programming, organizational culture, and systems change efforts? Come learn from the experiences of the Texas Change in Mind Learning Collaborative. This two-year project brought together ten diverse human service organizations in Texas from 2021-2023 to provide foundational content, peer-to-peer learning, implementation supports, and sustainability planning focused on these critical and connected topics.
In this session, participants will learn about the theory of change that guides the work of Social Current’s Change in Mind Institute, and hear directly from participants in the Texas Change in Mind cohort about their experiences in this learning community. Specifically, the presenters will analyze the themes and strategies that emerged across the cohort related to transformational change at multiple levels—programmatic, organizational culture, and community/systems change.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Ashley Tate
Impact & Data Quality Manager
Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Houston

Vaughan Gilmore
Chief Clinical Officer
Santa Maria Hostel

Santiago Cirnigliaro
Director of Community Development
Texas Alliance of Child and Family Services

Kelly Martin
Director, Practice Excellence
Social Current

Karen Johnson
Senior Director of Change in Mind
Social Current

Did you know that the first impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) is on the development of healthy executive function and self-regulation skills in 3-5 year olds? From late 2019-2021, three members of Social Current’s original Change in Mind brain science learning cohort joined forces to pilot home visiting and parenting group strategies to buffer children and caregivers against ACEs and toxic stress. With support from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child-Frontiers of Innovation, the three Change in Mind sites, the Institute for Child & Family Well-Being (Children’s Wisconsin), Children and Families First of Delaware, and The Family Partnership (TFP), came together to conduct rapid cycle, COVID-safe pilots of TFPs innovative Executive Functioning Across GenerationsTM curriculum. This session will discuss the results and learnings, implications for early childhood and parent support policy and practice, as well as how we are each continuing to innovate in the brain science space.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

John Till
Senior VP of Strategy & Innovation
The Family Partnership

Andrea Miller
Manager, Grants & Quality Excellence
Children & Families First of Delaware

Dianne Haulcy
President and CEO
The Family Partnership

Gabriel McGaughey
Director of Child Well-Being
Children’s Wisconsin Community Services

Kirstin Olson
CEO
Children & Families First