Our local community foundation has awarded me a year-long fellowship to delve into the topics of trauma, trauma-informed communities and resilience. Part of the fellowship includes a 3-week trip I'm currently on to visit agencies and communities that have done some in-depth work to implement trauma-informed care, to learn all I can from them to take back to our own community in Lancaster County, PA. I am blogging about each of the places I visit and thought the ACES Connection community might be interested in reading about these agencies and communities as well. So I'll post links to my articles about each visit here. Here's the first one - about Big Brothers Big Sisters of Calgary and Area and their trauma-informed mentoring approach:
At Big Brothers Big Sisters of Calgary and Area, Karen Orser and Cynthia Wild are on a mission: to make sure all of their staff and their mentors ("Bigs") understand the brain science that explains how the behaviors of the children they serve ("Littles") may tell a story of other things going on in the child's life, including traumatic experiences, toxic stress, and adversity. That knowledge is foundational to their focus on trauma-informed mentoring at BBBS Calgary.
Cynthia, Director of Service Delivery, explains, "It’s been important for us to differentiate between 'trauma-informed' and 'trauma-specific'. At BBBS, we don’t do trauma-specific care or treatment. We don't do therapy, we don't focus on the abuse someone has experienced. Our approach is a relational-based intervention that’s trauma-informed. This means recognizing the role trauma has played in the life of that young person and helping our mentors think about and re-frame the behavior they may see with their "Littles". Instead of thinking "What's wrong with you?" we want our mentors to think "What has happened to you?" We can't take the child's behavior personally. We want our mentors to engage in specific, practical activities with the child that can help to build the child's brain architecture."
They're developing activities based on Bruce Perry's "Regulate, Relate and Reason" framework, resources from the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child, and the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative (AFWI) "Core Story of Brain Development" resources.
Trauma-informed mentoring is changing BBBS Calgary's organizational narratives in a few key areas:
- the WHY of mentoring: because relationships with caring, responsive adults (mentors) can help build brain architecture in kids
- WHAT responsive mentoring looks like: "Bigs" are responsive to "Littles" when they notice and respond to their verbal and non-verbal cues
- WHO they mentor: a shift away from "any child who needs a mentor gets a mentor" to "we serve children and youth facing adversity"
- HOW they mentor: being intentional about training mentors to engage in activities with their mentees that build and strengthen Executive Function and Self-Regulation skills
Karen, BBBS Calgary's President and CEO, explains, "The focus on trauma-informed mentoring has given us a new language, new resources, and new ways to think about and talk about what's going on with kids." She adds that it has also required on-going conversations with staff, board members, volunteers and funders. Those conversations have raised challenging questions like:
- Are we getting too clinical?
- Will volunteers not want to volunteer if we're talking about brain science?
- Will it seem too hard [for mentors to incorporate brain research into their day to day interactions with kids]?
Both Karen and Cynthia are relatively new to their positions at BBBS. They had worked together previously at the YWCA, serving people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and mental health challenges. There, they saw how trauma played out in the lives of those clients. And in their first year here at BBBS, they're working to develop an agency culture that isn't afraid to take risks and to take a new look at long-established agency practices and policies, making changes when necessary.
BBBS Calgary is breaking new ground for Canada's national Big Brothers Big Sisters organization, and the national office is talking with Karen and Cynthia about how to incorporate brain science into the standard national training given to all BBBS mentors.
And BBBS Calgary is part of a larger three-year initiative with 15 agencies in Alberta and across the United States called Change in Mind: Applying Neurosciences to Revitalize Communities. Tomorrow, I'll be meeting with people from CUPS, another of the agencies here in Calgary that's involved in the Change in Mind initiative. So I'll post more about Change in Mind as well as CUPS after tomorrow's meeting.
Karen, Cynthia and their BBBS Calgary team are firmly committed and deeply invested in taking a trauma-informed approach based on the brain research, and they see it as essential to successful intervention with the children and youth they serve in their community. There's no doubt their investment will reap big benefits for the children, their families, the BBBS mentors, and their entire community.
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