At the Lancaster City Council meeting on Tuesday evening, May 10, Lancaster City Mayor Danene Sorace issued a proclamation recognizing the month of May as Mental Health and Trauma Awareness Month in the City.

Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health and the City of Lancaster have been working in partnership for the past year to further the goal of making Lancaster a trauma informed city. This initiative includes training all staff in five city departments* about trauma, resilience and trauma-informed practices, conducting assessments of each department's current policies, practices and physical environment against TI principles, identifying needed policy and procedure changes, establishing relevant metrics to track progress, then making changes and monitoring progress toward becoming trauma-informed.

At the Council meeting, several of the partners involved in this initiative made additional remarks on the importance of this designation and the trauma informed work going on in the City:

* Alice Yoder, Executive Director of Community Health, Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health

* Sharon Allen Spann, Leadership Development & Diversity Manager, City of Lancaster

* Leilany Tran, Social Worker, Lancaster City Bureau of Police

Here's a link to a video of the meeting,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9STJOApCZ6s

The full proclamation is attached below.