The Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) coordinates and advances the trauma-informed movement through education, activism, and advocacy. Founded in 2015, CTIPP’s mission is to create a healthy, just, resilient, and trauma-informed society where all individuals, families, and communities have the social, political, cultural, economic, and spiritual opportunities and support necessary to thrive.
THE PROBLEM
Most of our nation's population suffers from trauma. Prolonged exposure can create negative impacts throughout a lifespan which, if not addressed, can ripple across families, communities, and systems. The effects of trauma run rampant on an individual and societal level, impacting every system, and placing a burden on our nation’s under-resourced services. The cost of trauma in the United States is estimated at a minimum of $14 trillion per year in lost productivity and associated healthcare costs, and at least 650,000 lives annually.
Cross-sector trauma-informed coalitions have proven to be effective when supported and sustained properly; they can reduce a wide array of social problems and cost burdens on public systems. These coalitions are rapidly growing in number; the trauma-informed movement is uniquely positioned for rapid expansion in the near future.
What these coalitions currently lack is a central coordinating entity and platform where trauma-informed practitioners, advocates, and coalition members can share emerging and promising practices for advancing the movement. CTIPP aims to fill this need as a first-of-its-kind hub for the movement. In conjunction with the rapid expansion and deepening of the trauma-informed movement, the time is right for CTIPP to put in place a collective impact infrastructure for the movement’s continued growth.
THE SOLUTION
CTIPP is bringing together individuals and organizations working on the tribal, local, state, and federal levels to implement trauma-informed strategies to prevent and heal trauma across sectors. We believe advocacy and cross-sector coalitions are key next-steps to develop a foundation supporting long-term strategies to transform systems supporting individuals, families, and communities to thrive.
We strive to educate others about emerging information from the trauma-informed movement, as well as to activate the movement by transforming practitioners and community leaders into advocates for trauma-informed policies and practices. To do this, we:
Educate: We organize and convene our networks alongside key decision-makers and stakeholders to share promising practices to prevent traumatization and re-traumatization of and promote healing and resilience for individuals, families, and communities, as well as create opportunities for conversation amongst our networks. We support the growth of evidence for community-led, trauma-informed, prevention-oriented, resilience-building, and healing-centered practices and programs and we seek to foster a dialogue to drive social justice and dismantle oppression—historical, collective, and generational traumas that prevent wide scale community health and wellbeing.
Advocate: We work to create a groundswell of support for policies and practices that promote wellbeing. Our networks provide long-term and new advocates in the trauma-informed movement a home to foster belonging, learn how to bridge divides, and bring together their communities to take on trauma. We focus on developing an advocacy infrastructure that promotes trauma-informed approaches to advocacy, in addition to promoting trauma-informed policies and practices.
Activate: We educate the public and policymakers—particularly at the federal level—on the importance of addressing, reducing, and mitigating trauma and on the impact of trauma-informed approaches. Our resources provide folks the ability to organize across sectors and throughout our society. As the states are the laboratory of democracy, we provide local coalitions and grassroots advocates the tools to share their stories of triumph and tragedy with their elected officials and other key partners to increase support and implementation of trauma-informed approaches. We ensure collaboration among those enacting policy and those served by it to secure a bidirectional flow of information and support as iterative developments ultimately work toward beneficial transformation of society.
We engage our networks through three flagship initiatives that exist independently, yet complement each other:
Community Advocacy Network (CTIPP CAN) is our national grassroots network of community members, leaders, and practitioners, who regularly convene for peer-learning and education opportunities and mobilize to advocate for trauma-informed policies and practices at all levels of government. Due to capacity limitations, most of our current mobilization is focused on the federal level, though we track and support work at state and local levels. Through monthly CTIPP CAN calls, we convene advocates for meaningful discussions of their work, celebrations of success, and devise strategies to amplify and scale this work through public investments across all levels of government and all sectors.
PressOn is our strategy to develop a national coalition of local and statewide cross-sector coalitions. By developing an infrastructure connecting national, state, and local cross-sector coalitions through a network that reaches the grassroots, we are generating a consistent exchange of information through which the trauma-informed movement can learn about/from community innovation, mobilize advocacy, and promote promising practices. This living and learning system facilitates coordination, mobilization, and movement building, which enables us to perpetuate momentum long into the future. This creates a trauma-informed infrastructure to decentralize power throughout the movement and ensure support is provided to where it matters most - in community - as we know that healing happens in the context of healthy relationships over time.
Ideas Lab is our platform for innovation, research, and development of tools, training, and resources needed to propel our collective work forward. To date, we have focused on producing toolkits, guides, and other resources to promote continued learning opportunities and supports throughout the field. As our capacity and network grows, there is a powerful opportunity to learn directly from community implementation and innovation and support a more generative structure to promote emerging and promising practices, working toward a stronger evidence base than currently exists.
These three distinct initiatives are collaborative to engage perpetual growth across the trauma-informed movement. Developing and nurturing an infrastructure of advocates (CTIPP CAN) and coalitions (PressOn) allows the movement to grow in both realms of policy and practice, ensuring they are working together to maximize existing, and mobilize around further, investments as time moves forward.
Ideas Lab synthesizes the information we learn through these networks and develops novel resources to advance the field, providing further opportunity for advocacy and coalition building. By creating bidirectional flow, we provide space for collective learning and connection, perpetuating continued growth and strengthening the networks at all levels.
Through our efforts, CTIPP is successfully serving as the hub for the trauma-informed movement. In service to the expanding movement, we are seeking to increase our capacity. We have a clear vision of how our current initiatives will continue to develop, not just for the growth of CTIPP, but to facilitate our ability to serve as a powerful intermediary for the movement as a whole.
OUR VISION
With the ongoing growth of the trauma-informed movement, the time is right for CTIPP to increase capacity and expand our programmatic reach and impact. The movement is positioned to address the wicked problems our world is facing and is at a boiling point.
Our organization is currently and primarily led by a four-person team: Executive Director, Director of Empowerment and Engagement, Director of Trauma-Informed Practice and Systems Transformation, and Director of Communications and Outreach.
Due to capacity limitations, most of our team works other jobs and the Executive Director position is on loan. While this has provided sufficient capacity through CTIPP’s startup phase, it is unsustainable long-term, given the scope of our vision and work.
Our small-but-mighty team works conjointly with our Board of Directors and broader web of partners to operate CTIPP’s programs, identify organizational priorities, and develop dynamic strategies. However, we have reached the limit of what we can achieve without growth. With expanded capacity, CTIPP aims to:
Evolve into an intermediary organization providing technical assistance to the trauma-informed movement at large and focusing government affairs efforts on strategic opportunities. We aim to uplift advocate voice across all dimensions, fund trauma-informed work of coalitions across the country, and better learn and mobilize around emerging practices.
Make a further investment of staff time and expertise to support trauma-informed advocacy at the state, local, tribal, and someday international levels. We currently focus most of our work on the federal level due to limited capacity, yet we are aware of the tremendous work happening outside the federal level and the need for movement coordination and learning space across all levels.
Expand our consistent offerings of educational content as no single time works well for advocates in so many different time zones, and more topics for valuable learning, conversation, and connection are readily available, necessary, and wanted.
Create sustainability for multiple full-time staff members across the four main teams that operate CTIPP’s programming day-to-day: Administration, Communication, Empowerment & Engagement, and Practice & Systems Transformation.
Produce toolkits, reports, and guides that meet and are informed by emerging needs and practices throughout the movement and address numerous topics through a trauma-informed lens.
Maximize the impact of the tools and projects we create through targeted media campaigns.
To fully realize our vision, we have developed a tiered fundraising agenda allowing CTIPP to scale as our capacity grows. We are seeking to raise at least $2 million in 2024 to create sustainability for multiple full-time staff members to support our national work, including full-time and fairly compensated positions across: administrative staff including Development, HR, and Finance; associate roles to support advocacy, communications, and research; and capacity for strategic planning support with the Board.
This funding will also allow us to begin making grants directly to coalitions in our networks, providing direct support, which will create new opportunities for mobilization and data collection. As we build our capacity further, CTIPP will be in position to address a full range of work—community relations, advocacy supports and government affairs, research, communications, grant development, and beyond—enabling us to build and bolster this critical movement at all levels.
JOIN THE MOVEMENT
We are eager to grow our organizational and institutional partnerships so we can powerfully and collectively work towards a healthy and just future in which all individuals can truly thrive. Your support of CTIPP will allow us to amplify a burgeoning movement; a movement poised to make transformative, collective, and sustainable change across the country at local, regional, state, and federal levels.
For more information about CTIPP or ways in which we can partner together, please reach out at jesse@ctipp.org.