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The ChildTrauma Academy Newsletters |
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In this issue of our Newsletter series, The ChildTrauma Academy will highlight some of our ongoing training and education projects. At the heart of the mission of The ChildTrauma Academy is the goal of sharing recent advances in trauma, maltreatment, neurodevelopment and child development with our peers and the larger community. We are convinced that education is a key to positive systemic change. In service of this goal, in the last five years alone, CTA Fellows have presented in more than a dozen countries, in four Provinces in Canada and in all fifty of the states in the US. These efforts have directly reached more than 40,000 people per year. A core aspect of these training efforts is to begin to integrate key principles of child development and neurodevelopment into practice, program and policy. We are convinced that more developmentally-informed, biologically respectful practices in child rearing, education, mental health, child protection, juvenile justice and other key systems serving high risk children are necessary to improve our world. In addition to our direct training activities we provide online resources on our website that serve more than 10,000 individuals per month. In this newsletter we will highlight two examples of other Train-the-Trainer projects the CTA has developed with partners in Oregon and California. We have been using a combination of in person and distance learning methods and the results have been very positive. We appreciate the positive feedback we received from our previous Newsletters and we look forward to your comments on this Newsletter. We will continue to work hard to provide useful and timely information to help you continue to better understand and serve high risk children and their families. The image below shows Dr. Perry presenting in Belgium last year at an International Congress on Child Abuse.  Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.
The Safe from the Start is a progressive and innovative
project run by the California Attorney General's office. The
overarching objective of this project is to decrease the
exposure of children to violence. For the last five years,
Dr. Bruce Perry and The ChildTrauma Academy have been
working with the Safe from the Start team. This
collaboration has involved direct training to parents,
practioners and policy makers. We have also created a unique
multi- media violence prevention program was created for
schools by modifying some of the existing CTA materials. The
current project, a Train-the-Trainer program, has been
working with 40 trainers representing every county in
California. Using a combination of CTA video and print
materials, live day-long teaching institutes and web-based
distance learning (see later), this group has been working
together to build capacity and improve communication skills
to allow each of these trainers to continue in their efforts
to educate their peers and their communities about the
importance of early childhood and the devastating effects of
exposure to abuse and violence. This cost-effective method
is expected to directly impact more than 50,000 people in
California in the next two years alone.
In combination with the experiences from our other distance training and consultation projects, the Safe from the Start TTT project is providing the experience we need to begin to offer Train-the- Trainer and Case-based Training activities to a wide range of interested communities and organizations. If you are interested participating in some of the new subscription, distance consultation and distance learning services of The ChildTrauma Academy please feel free to contact us.
Klamath County Oregon is an amazing place. For the last
three years, a group of dedicated professionals has been
working to transform their community. One of the strategies
they use is to focus on the importance of early childhood.
Part of this effort is the Klamath County Collaborative
Train-the-Trainer Project. While the Safe from the Start TTT
project is geographically spread throughout California, the
Klamath TTT Project is unique in its intense focus within a
single community. More that 58 hours of training activities
have been completed by approximately 40 Trainers from
diverse educational backgrounds and current professional
activities. The goal of this intensive focus on an
interdisciplinary, cross-institutional project is to create
a cadre' of trainers within the same community but embedded
in various sectors - public, private - corporate and non-
profit - all with the goal of teaching the greater community
about the core principles of child development and the
devasting impact of chaos, neglect, exposure to violence and
trauma on the developing brain.
Both the Safe from the Start TTT and the Klamath County Collaborative TTT Project started their training activities by watching a set of training videos/DVDs produced by The ChildTrauma Academy. These two series, "Understanding Traumatized and Maltreated Children" and "The Six Core Strengths for Healthy Childhood Development" were created with this kind of training project in mind. Other support readings and powerpoint presentation materials are also part of the CTA Training Packages. The combination of self-guided learning with the CTA training materials, in person training from CTA personnel and distance learning in a set of live web-enhanced audioconferences has provided the solid base from which these Trainers can continue to impact their community.
The ChildTrauma Academy receives more than 500 requests for
training each year. Despite an ever increasing number of
Fellows capable of providing high quality teaching in a
range of topics (e.g., brain development to sexualized
behaviors of children to clinical interventions to policy
recommendations) we can not meet all of the training,
consultation and program development requests that come to
us. In the last year, CTA has developed the capacity to
provide real-time, web-based training and consultation
capabilities. Microsoft's LiveMeeting capabilities and phone
conferencing with Reservationless Plus from Intercall allow
us to schedule a wide range of clinical, program
consultation and training activities.
For many of our clinical program projects we are able to have staffings or case-based training activities across multiple sites (e.g., our partners in Kansas, Oklahoma, Denver and Philadelphia) and with our geographically-spread out ChildTrauma Fellows - all in the same "virtual" classroom or clinic. This approach has allowed us to create virtual problems solving teams to help children and continue to improve practice, programs and impact policy. We look forward to sharing more about our distance training and consulting projects in future CTA Newsletters.
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