What is a trauma-informed community? One definition, from The Wilson Foundation, in Rochester, NY, is: “A strategic approach that links all community sectors together around the effects of trauma, while preventing gaps in services for clients.”

But I like this description from an article about Tarpon Springs, Florida, one of the first communities in the US to declare itself a trauma-informed community:

"Being a trauma-informed community means that Tarpon Spring has made a commitment to engage people from all sectors—education, juvenile justice, faith, housing, health care and business—in common goals. The first is to understand how personal adversity affects the community’s well being. The second is to institute resilience-building practices so that people, organizations and systems no longer traumatize already traumatized people and instead contribute to building a healthy community."

 For more information on lessons learned from a 2017 trip to visit trauma-informed communities in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, see this keynote presentation from the October, 2017 Positive Change Conference in Lancaster.