With supportive, effective, and sustainable structures in place, local mission-driven non-profits can focus their efforts on building a better community.
Services offered to mitigate the impact of systemic trauma include vicarious trauma workshops and assessments of trauma effective organizations.
Experiential workshops:
vicarious trauma
Vicarious, or secondary, trauma refers to the nervous system dysregulation that can occur when someone is exposed to trauma(s) through working with traumatized populations. Vicarious trauma can have a significant impact on organizations, including:
- Staff well-being: physical and psychological symptoms may lead to increased stress, burnout, and turnover.
- Organizational effectiveness: can negatively impact team cohesion, communication, and collaboration. Reduces the quality and timeliness of services provided.
- Organizational reputation: can negatively impact an organization’s reputation, deterring potential employees and referral/funding sources.
- Workplace culture: traumatic symptoms tend to a shift worldview, which can alter or damage fundamental beliefs relative to self, others, and systems.
Workshops include the following components: psychoeducation on vicarious trauma; self-regulation and co-regulation strategies; and cognitive and somatic processing experiences.
AssessmentS:
Trauma Effective Organizations
Evaluation, with follow-up recommendations, of embedded trauma informed care principles (SAMSHA) into organizational policies, systems, and environment including:
- Safety: throughout the organization, staff and the people they serve feel physically and psychologically safe.
- Trustworthiness & transparency: operations and decisions are conducted with transparency and the goal of building and maintaining trust.
- Collaboration & mutuality: true partnering and leveling of power differences within the organization and in services rendered.
- Empowerment & choice: strengths are recognized, built on, and validated and new skills developed as necessary. The experience of choice strengthened.
- Cultural, historical & gender issues: actively moves past cultural stereotypes and biases, offers gender responsive services, leverages the healing value of traditional cultural connections, and recognizes and addresses historical trauma.
Change the systems, heal the people