Trauma and Healing
Reckoning with Race and COVID-19 in Infant-Family Mental Health
In August 2020, the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg provided support to expand the “Trauma-Informed Infant-Family Mental Health (TI-IFMH) Collaborative” initiative that strengthened capacities of infant and family-serving agencies throughout Pinellas County in improving their organizations’ trauma-informed family-centered practices. The consultation and reflective supervision provided in this new project expansion centered more specifically on race-based trauma, and the project was designed to help increase the number of and support for BIPOC practitioners in Pinellas County.
The aims of this work, led by FSC Assistant Program Director Dr. LaDonna Butler, were to begin expanding the scope of services in Pinellas County and south St. Petersburg so that Black families could receive trauma-informed family-centered supports informed by the differential impact of COVID on Black families - in an era of heightened race-based trauma and reckoning with anti-Black bias. The project expanded learning circles of interested partners from the original TI-IFMH network to include an assembly of Black and Brown helping professionals – both those who worked with families of young children and those whose clienteles involved older children and adults. Reflective supervision processes previously provided to partner agencies on the original FHSP grant were made available to this new learning circle.
An important aim of this phase of the work was to collate resources indicative of best practice guidelines that might help cultivate more egalitarian and productive joint dialogues by and between Black and Brown service professionals and the White professionals who have dominated child, adult, and family therapy fields since their inception. Toward this end, the project presents the following Reflective Supervision session, facilitated by our long-time colleague Maureen Joseph, as an illustration of the kinds of conversations possible within informed agencies:
In this reflective supervision session, invited guest Maureen Joseph led a discussion about building practitioner capacity to effectively support families contending with the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19.
Additional Resources
In 2022-23, our community partner, The Well for Life, helped to collate additional resources for practitioners committed to assuring their trauma-informed, family-centered practices.