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Support healthy, resilient, and thriving families

CTIPP adopts an ecological and systems-oriented lens, which is grounded in the acknowledgment that individual family members and family units can impact (and be impacted by) trauma experiences and recovery efforts to prevent and address trauma in children and younger people, adults, groups, and communities.

 

When considering how to facilitate comprehensive societal transformation, CTIPP believes in supporting family-driven care and support proven to increase awareness of and responsiveness to trauma and adversity, instill hope, and build individual and collective resilience

 

What defines a family? In the context of our trauma-informed policy and practice priorities, the term “family” is not relegated to what dominant American cultural norms may convey as a more “traditional nuclear family.” Instead, at its simplest, it refers to a group of people who have a shared history and demonstrate a future commitment to one another.

CTIPP SUPPORTS:

  • Reform policies related to mandated reporters through a trauma-informed lens

  • Promote and support families in accessing protective and compensatory experiences and practices that the research highlights as critical to increasing positive family experiences, building resilience, as well as bolstering physical, spiritual, emotional, social, and psychological wellbeing

  • Expand and fund trauma-informed family peer support groups

  • Enhance care coordination by providing education on resources, services, and supports available to address/prevent trauma and help families thrive, as well as facilitating access to such services by simplifying and providing formalized guidance around navigating such resources, services, and supports

  • Fund and promote social activities and events that can bring families together, raise awareness, or offer educational opportunities, particularly in trauma-impacted and otherwise under-resourced communities

  • Adopt multigenerational approaches to trauma recovery and resilience-building demonstrated to disrupt the transgenerational transmission of trauma

  • Increase avenues for meaningful participation and collaboration that centers on the family voice

  • Expand trauma-informed parent preparation programming emphasizing positive, supportive parenting and the creation of healthy attachment in critical developmental years

  • Train the workforce to understand, recognize, respond to, and prevent trauma and its impacts

  • Adopt culturally-responsive, trauma-informed approaches to community and family engagement that strive to decrease internalized stigma, blame, and shame, debunk damaging myths rooted in bias and oppression and reframe toward a lens of acknowledging various methods of adaptation, coping, and survival to honor the wisdom of lived experience

  • Increase awareness of and education on the importance of self-and collective care, particularly in communities where families are navigating high levels of stress, challenge, change, and/or trauma

  • Increase choice and access to programming and services that help families make decisions about whether and how to add children to their families

  • Bolster access to and quality of prenatal/maternal care and reform payment models to ensure coverage

  • Eradicate parent and infant health disparities by addressing the social determinants of health/mental health

  • Promote permanency through supporting kinship families in providing healthy environments

  • Support increased access to services that address substance use, trauma, and other mental/behavioral health-related challenges for pregnant and parenting people

  • Continue to explore, strengthen, and expand access related to technology-based visitation as well as family programming, therapeutic practices, and other services/support

  • Expand access to trauma-informed, family-centered home visiting, particularly for new and expectant parents in areas that are under-resourced and/or trauma-impacted

  • Increase support and resources for emerging adults “aging out” of foster care and their families

  • Implement practices that increase safety, well-being, and permanency that preserve cultural connections and maintain bonds with families of origin to the extent possible

  • Engage the Interagency Task Force on Trauma-Informed Care to make recommendations in creating a trauma-informed and trauma-responsive child- and family-serving systems, as well as to provide technical assistance to support, monitor, and evaluate fidelity and outcomes related to the implementation of its recommendations

  • Enhance support for families with complex needs, such as those belonging to groups/populations more likely to experience traumatic stress, families with members with intellectual/developmental disabilities, single-parent households, families with incarcerated members, etc.

  • Prioritize grants and otherwise incentivize the use of trauma-informed, culturally-responsive approaches to promoting family thriving, particularly in trauma-impacted communities

  • Address and devise strategies to repair the harms of bias and oppression across family-serving systems

  • Bolster resilience and wellness among the workforce by providing education and support to address the impacts of interfacing with trauma in doing the work

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