Trauma and Healing
Trauma-Informed Infant-Family Mental Health Collaborative
In August 2018, the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg awarded the Family Study Center a 3-year grant to collaborate with five major child- and family-serving agencies in Pinellas County to build stronger family centered, trauma-informed practices into their agencies’ policies, practices and procedures. In working toward building more synchronized approaches across systems and enhancing collective impact, the Trauma Informed Infant Family Mental Health Collaborative project offered training and consultation to partner agencies to integrate trauma sensitive perspectives within services and broaden the agencies’ focus to better integrate fathers, coparents, and families into their ways of work. The FSC’s role in the project as a Systems IECMH Consultant involved coordinating and facilitating the collaborations of all agency systems partnering together in this endeavor.
OTHER FSC INITIATIVES CONTIBUTING TO TRAUMA INFORMED FAMILY CENTERED PRACTICES
Since its inception, the FSC has contributed to and sometimes provided leadership for community conversations and initiatives regarding trauma-informed family-centered practices, and offered education and training to help advance this framework. Besides the TI-IFMH Collaborative, the following provides a sampling of past and ongoing initiatives and committee work strengthening coordinated community responses in Pinellas County to meet families where they are, respect individual family experiences and adaptations in response to both historical trauma and contemporary adversity, and inclusively serve fathers, mothers, relatives, and all those who are involved in infants' and toddlers' care and upbringing. The FSC has recently provided training and/or partnered with other community agencies and leaders to meet these shared goals via numerous committees/conferences and initiatives:
- Listening to Babies, an annual Family Study Center event each February during "Baby Talk Week" in collaboration with Concerned Organization for Quality Education for Black Students (COQEBS)
- Figuring It Out for the Child, a program for unmarried expectant couples funded by the National Institutes of Health, Brady Education Foundation and Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County
- Within My Reach funded by the Administration for Children and Families' Office of Family Assistance
- OEL-PDG Reflective Supervision, funded by the state of Florida's Office of Early Learning
- Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County 0-3 Think Tank
- Thrive by Five Steering Committee and Systems Alignment Workgroup
- The Midtown Early Care and Education Collaborative Project, funded by the Florida state legislature
- Coparenting and Clinical Subcommittees for the Circuit 6 Early Childhood Court, and service provision for the Circuit's Opioid Affected Youth Initiative: Aiding Drug Impacted Children in Out-of-Home Care
- The High Quality Early Care and Education for Dependent Youth Committee (HQEEDY), Pinellas
- The Florida Association of Infant Mental Health Pinellas Chapter
NEXT STEPS FOR TRAUMA SENSITIVE AND FAMILY CENTERED PRACTICE
The FSC is committed to helping further our community's understanding of and response to the impact of trauma in the lives of young children, families, and across communities, and to illuminating how efforts that strengthen coparenting in families are key to preventing re-traumatization and to fostering healing and resilience. As numerous funders and agencies throughout Pinellas County, including the Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County, the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg, the Pinellas Community Foundation, and numerous other partners have cemented their own commitment to advancing this now-common goal of supporting expectant parents and families who are parenting children birth to age 3, the FSC stands ready to support the local, national and global community in strengthening families and supporting the healthy development of all children.