Breakthrough Series Collaborative Final Report
The Trauma-Informed Resilient City for Children and Families Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) began in June 2015 and formally concluded with a reunion meeting on November 15, 2016. It included nine teams, representing a range of “formal” and “informal” organizations across Baltimore.
Families dealing with trauma experiences often benefit from counseling services to help with healing. But with so many things to consider, it can be hard to decide if now is the right time or if it would be better to wait for some time to pass.
In 2008, FITT Center collaborated with the Maryland Coalition of Families for Children’s Mental Health (MD Coalition) and Youth MOVE-Maryland to include family and youth voice into the Center’s outreach, awareness/training activity and intervention and product development.
The FITT Center is a unique collaboration among the University of Maryland’s Schools of Medicine and Social Work and the Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress at Kennedy Krieger Institute. The FITT Center combines the institutional expertise and resources of these separate entities in efforts to advance the child trauma field by increasing delivery of trauma-informed services to families who have suffered chronic trauma and to expand knowledge and skills to promote family resiliency and positive outcomes, including behavioral health equity.
National and local efforts to understand the impact of trauma, especially complex trauma, on families; to recognize that families are the foundation through which children comprehend and cope with their traumatic experiences; and to understand that family trauma interventions optimize healing.
The FITT Center will enhance system capacity to address the needs of children and their families using a three-pronged approach:
1: Increase availability of training and tools for child service systems’ workforces to work with family exposed to chronic trauma by widely disseminating the FITT Toolkit and developing innovative training curricula focusing on family informed, evidence-based trauma interventions for mental health professionals and master and doctoral student.
2: Improve access to three effective family trauma treatments, Strengthening Families Coping Resources (SFCR), Trauma Adapted Family Connections (TA-FC), and a family based assessment and treatment planning tool, Family Assessment of Needs and Strengths-Trauma (FANS-Trauma).
3: Develop messages and tools designed to help families experiencing stress and trauma be heard as they advocate in the public arena and within child service systems.
"When a family or any member of a family experiences trauma, family trauma interventions support healing.”
