The Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress at Kennedy Krieger Institute and the University of Maryland School of Social Work will establish an NCTSI Category II TSA center, the Collective for Antiracist Child and Family Systems (CACFS), to transform child and family-serving systems by supporting organizations and providers to adopt antiracist, anti-oppressive practices to prevent trauma exposure and repair trauma effects among Black and Latinx children, youth, and families.
Target population: CACFS will train and support human services providers, including social workers and mental health clinicians, supervisors, and administrators, from child and family serving organizations and systems, including child welfare agencies.
Strategies/ Interventions: The CACFS will develop, model, and expand the implementation of three culturally responsive trauma approaches, SHARP, Radical Healing, and HEART.
Goals and objectives: CACFS will: (1) expand the knowledge base for, and increase the number of organizations working to reduce trauma in Black/African American and Latinx children by effectively institutionalizing antiracist, anti-oppressive practices; and (2) address behavioral health disparities by developing and promoting antiracist, anti-oppressive trauma-informed care approaches, to support Black/African American and Latinx children and families to heal from trauma by engaging providers to increase knowledge and skills, and adopt new practices; and organizations to increase readiness for and/or commit to adopting practices, policies, and strategic plans that centralize racial equity and healing. CACFS will achieve its goals by: establishing a 16-member CACFS Advisory Board to engage parents, family members, and youth to develop, and oversee CACFS plans; utilize existing organizational readiness tools to assess organizations’ preparedness to implement antiracist trauma-informed practices; serving as a continuing resource for at least 40 child and family-serving organizations to learn and adopt antiracist, anti-oppressive practices and policies by providing training, education, and technical assistance grounded in implementation science; promoting culturally responsive and racially conscious approaches to healing trauma through a service system awareness campaign via social media, video messages, and a website reaching at least 900 human service providers; conducting formative and summative evaluation of CACFS efforts incorporating a community-based participatory methodology; disseminating best practices and products to expand implementation of trauma interventions within the NCTSN, including to the Pediatric Integrated Care Collaborative; developing, modeling, and expanding the implementation of the SHARP and Radical Healing frameworks and HEART intervention, including by creating products such as fidelity monitoring tools, train-the-trainer modules, handbooks and guidance resources, as well as partnering with implementing organizations including Maryland child welfare agencies, professional organizations, and others to implement and test the approaches. CACFS expects to serve an average of 400 human services providers annually and 2000 providers over the life of the project.