The third annual Delaware Trauma Matters conference, held on January 28 at Wilmington University, drew a diverse crowd of 200 from around the state and across many sectors, including healthcare, mental health, education, corrections, and child serving agencies among others. While some said this degree of diversity was unusual in the state, the leader of Delaware’s trauma initiative, Leslie Brower (pictured on the right with Aileen Fink, who serves as community manager along with Brower for the Delaware ACEs Action group on ACEs Connection) was not satisfied with the status quo. She urged people to get involved in the work of the steering committee, bring in new faces, especially by increasing the number of African-Americans, other minorities, and people with lived experience. She seemed thrilled that there were people from all three of Delaware’s counties and even one Philadelphian.
Brower announced that the findings of a new survey covering the 10 original ACEs plus five additional items, will be available this Fall. In planning the survey, Brower said that they looked at the survey done in Philadelphia and felt that additional measures of adversity such as racism and poverty should be included. The summary of data on children in Delaware statewide and in Wilmington produced by the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) was shared with the participants. Brower said the new data was needed in part because of the “huge undercount” in the CAHMI survey that does not include data on physical and sexual abuse.
Among the high points for me was meeting Leslie Newman, CEO of Children and Families First (CFF) in Wilmington, whom I had only talked to on the phone. Newman was there with colleagues Kirsten Olson and Julius Mullen; they're responsible for CFF’s participation in the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities’ 15-organization initiative, “Change in Mind: Applying Neurosciences to Revitalize Communities.” “Change in Mind,” funded by the Robert Wood Johnson and Palix foundations, “hopes to accelerate the movement of brain science into the policies and practices of the nonprofit human-serving sector.”
Mullen, chief clinical officer of CFF, introduced the video of Nadine Burke Harris’ Ted Med talk (which now has close to 2 million views) and noted how he and others on the “Change in Mind” team have been learning about brain science and trauma from experts around the state and region. The grantees, including CFF, met in Washington, DC, in mid-January to develop strategies and to learn from experts including representatives of the FrameWorks Institute about how to best communicate their messages about trauma, toxic stress, and resilience to policymakers.
Kirsten Olson, chief strategy officer for CFF, laid the foundation for five workshops (education and training; direct services, organizational change; systems change: and community outreach and communications) by describing how to build a theory of change to infuse trauma-informed care and brain science across systems in the state. Olson co-facilitated with Robin Timme, chief psychologist with Connections Community Support Programs, the workshop on community outreach and communications where the group addressed what changes were needed in systems and what activities would bring about the change. The results of the brainstorming sessions will be compiled and shared with all conference participants. Kristina Olson (center-not related to Kirsten Olson) reported out for our group that also included Sophie Day (right) and Robin Murphy (left).
The conference organizers sought to make the meeting itself “trauma-informed” by encouraging participation, warmly welcoming everyone, and starting the meeting with a guided stress reduction exercise, led by Noel Duckworth of the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
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