Clifford Beers (CB), a 107 year old institution providing trauma informed mental health services for children and adults throughout the lifespan has been strategically growing its whole family, trauma informed integrated care, model of care designed to reduce chronic stress. Focusing our work on the systemic and structural changes related to the delivery of mental health services, this project proposes to develop and implement and infuse anti-racist training in our model of care, developing a tool kit for replication of Trauma Informed Anti-Racist (TIAR) Whole Family Approach to Care. The main purpose of the project is to integrate whole family anti-racist thinking and social determinants of health perspective in trauma-informed service system design, to ensure the trauma treatments are responsive to inequity, sensitive to systemic racism and care is contextualized to the needs of the people served. CB and its project collaborators (Johns Hopkins Pediatric Intensive Care Collaborative, KPJR Films, Community Healing Network, the CT Missionary Baptist Convention, and Mashantucket Tribal Nation) will work to infuse trauma treatment with an anti-racist perspective, providing multiple opportunities for training, education, and technical assistance with the goal of wide-scale dissemination and implementation of effective, anti-racist evidence-based treatment and service approaches in child and family trauma. CB and its partners will serve as a continuing resource for training, consultation, and technical assistance to service providers and family/youth affected by traumatic events.
Project goals are: 1: Mental Health systems redesigned with a Whole Family, Trauma Informed, and Anti-Racist (TIAR) perspective to increase access; 2: Deliver accessible trauma-informed, client/family-centered evidence-based, anti-racist mental health services for Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) children and families; 3: Create a Faith-Based TIAR model of care to be disseminated within the CT BIPOC; 4: Develop and sustain an infrastructure to support anti-racist structures and systems, promoting equity, diversity and inclusion; Goal 5: Engage and partner with the community to achieve racial justice by promoting equity in health and well-being. The following activities are proposed: 1). Build on PICC breakthrough series on Anti-Racist Pediatric Integrated Care and expand to include TIAR Mental Health services; 2). Design with the CMS Integrated Care for Kids (InCK) partners systems of care for children and families TIAR approaches and train partners in TIAR service design. Develop a replication model of the TIAR curriculum for INCK and other Providers for their use. 3). Develop and present a training curriculum on Anti-Racist systems of care, Liberation Psychology, Black Psychology, for providers, educators and communities across CT, and the U.S; 4). Work with Faith Based communities on creating mental health systems of care for their congregants. Over the five year grant period, the program expects to provide training to over 2000 mental health professions.