Notes from November 18, 2014 Trauma Responsive Congregations Community of Practice

Notes from November 18, 2014 Trauma Informed Congregations Community of Practice

• Doug Ronshiem  -- American Pastoral Counselors
• Roberta Waite -- Drexel
• Sabrina – Salvation Army
• Jon McHatton – Congressman Matt Salmon’s office
• Rachel Bauman -- ELCA
• Michael M – Salvation Army
• Sandy – HHS Region VIII
• Lance Walker – LDS Church
• Cherri Pruitt – HHS Region VIII
• Elizabeth Power – Risking Connections
• Farha Abbasi – MSU and Muslim Mental Health
• Tina Hahn – pediatrician
• Nicole Wood – Blue Campaign
• Josh Bancroft – Partnership Center
• Sis Wegner – Adult Children of Alcoholics Association

Muslim Mental Health 7^th Annual Conference – Farha Abbasi is the conference organizer and briefed the TIC on what she is building.   This conference is focusing on trauma and faith healing.  The TIC is partnering to build an interfaith day on 26 March. 

The American Pastoral Counseling Association is building a 5- Module training series on trauma-responsive approaches for congregations.  Doug Ronshiem and Elizabeth Powers briefed the group, and explored potential partnerships.  They will present one module at the Muslim Mental Health Annual Conference. They will also schedule a time to preview their first module with our group in the coming months. We would like to have a call the week after Thanksgiving to finalize the agenda.  We will invite the whole group. If you are interested in being part of a small planning team, please join.

California ACEs Summit report out: The Center for Youth Wellness hosted the first annual California ACE’s Summit last month. Founded by Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris, who has the Bayview-Hunter’s Point clinic. Conf called “Children Can Thrive” with over 200 ppl there from health comm, peds and PCPs and researchers.  The conference included people from education, child welfare, and medicine. For some participants it was their introduction to trauma-informed approaches and practices.  Many began to see natural alignment, how to work together, separate presentations about what was happening nationally, state, locally.  While the California conference was happing, other conference were simultaneously held in Gainesville FL and city in Alaska.

Growing the Community:  Each member of the community was asked to invite people from their networks to join our community.  We will be sending some stock language to make it easy for you to invite folks. Our plan is to have monthly calls, followed up by month reports from the call.  These reports will act as a clearinghouse for sharing information. If you have trainings, announcements, materials, etc that you would like to share, please send them to Kimberly.  She will be sure to include them in the next month’s notes, which will eventually be housed at the Partnership Center’s website and on ACESConnection.com

Social Media and Outreach team

Cherri Pruitt ofHHS Region IV suggested we host our meetings via Adobe Connect so that they can be recorded and stored.  We would like to have a small group of people interested in communication strategies to meet in the next couple of weeks. We’d like to build a social media strategy and explore how we can get started with the right technology so that we are transparent and our work is captured.  We will send an invitation to the whole group, but if you are interested, please let Kimberly know.

Moving from Trauma Informed to Trauma Responsive: Dr Tina Hahn briefed us on some of the latest movement in the field.  We discussed changing our focus to being trauma-informed to being trauma-responsive.  The group resonated with this construct so we may be changing our name.

New Partnerships Along with inviting the folks in our networks, a few of our members are part of the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association faith-based initiative committee.  Members will invite the APsychiatricA’s Faith Based Initiative and APA Div 56.

Teams:  There is a bunch of work to do.  If we all do a little and what we do best, we can get a bunch done in a short period of time.  To this end, I hope that community members will self-select onto teams that might utilize their talents and knowledge.  So far we need teams to help with:

• Social Media
• Planning the Muslim Mental Health Training day and Spring meeting
• Building the clearinghouse/bibliography of resources, research, promising practices, etc