New York

Parsons Child and Family Center (PCFC) provides treatment services to children and adolescents in northeastern New York State. The Parsons treatment continuum includes residential and foster care, outreach to schools and day care centers, and mental health and prevention services for children who have been physically and sexually abused, and/or exposed to domestic and community violence. Now refunded, PCFC will establish the HEROES Project (Healing with Emotional Resilience, Opportunities, and Enduring Supports) to engage New York practitioners to develop and implement integrated services with trauma-informed and resiliency-focused strategies that are matched to the resources, risks, and cultural heritage of children and families referred to residential treatment, foster family, and home-based child welfare, as well as to affiliated mental health programs. The HEROES Project will fill critical gaps that often lead to fragmented and ineffective services. Goals include: 1) fostering enduring emotionally supportive relationships that protect children from abuse and neglect, and that help children resume healthy growth and skill development; 2) increasing and maintaining the number of child welfare practitioners in the region utilizing trauma-informed and resiliency-focused interventions; and 3) fostering skills and procedures that mitigate against the consequences of vicarious trauma that is related to working with children and family members who suffer from traumatic life experiences.

The Creating & Sustaining the Next Generation of Trauma-Informed Practitioners project will implement “Core Concepts First"—a model that combines foundational developmentally informed trauma knowledge with five treatments designed to treat the pervasive developmental effects of trauma. The center's model will transform NCTSN trauma training; and will increase the capacity of practitioners, schools of social work (SSWs), and community agencies to provide children, adolescents, and their families with the most effective trauma-informed treatment. Working with practitioners, community-based agencies, NCSTN Category II sites, and SSWs, the center will implement its Core Concepts First model, which combines NCTSN’s Core Curriculum on Childhood Trauma (CCCT) with trauma treatment trainings. The goals of the project are to strengthen trauma training by: 1) increasing practitioners’ knowledge of developmental trauma; 2) transforming the ways in which the NCTSN offers trauma treatment training; 3) creating the infrastructure to assist community agencies to become organizationally ready to introduce and sustain trauma treatment; 4) developing the capacity of practitioners and community agencies to provide developmentally informed trauma care for military families and children, and Native American children; and 5) extending the center's local, regional, and national reach. The populations to be served are community agencies, SSWs, current practitioners and future (now student) practitioners who work with children and youth whose early exposure to multiple episodes of interpersonal violence in the context of deprivation and neglect puts them at increased risk for negative developmental consequences across their lifespan. During the four years of the grant, the project will reach more than 1,500 agency practitioners, 30–40 new SSWs, and more than 2,000 students.

Community PARTNERS (Prevention of Adverse Reactions to Negative Events and Related Stress) at St. John's University developed and sustains a community-wide network of providers implementing trauma-informed, evidence-based services. Primary care personnel provide these services to underserved, inner-city traumatized children throughout Queens and eastern Brooklyn, New York. Each year, more than 29,000 children are screened and more than 1,500 abused and/or bereaved children receive assessment and treatment services. The majority of these children are Latino, African American, Caribbean American, or Asian.

Community PARTNERS worked with members of the local community and NCTSN to 1) adapt screening, assessment, and treatment procedures and components to be culturally informed and language accessible; 2) train pediatrics staff and community providers to screen and refer children for child sexual abuse (CSA), child physical abuse (CPA), and traumatic bereavement (TB); 3) train mental health staff to provide evidence-based, culturally informed assessments and treatment of children exposed to CSA, CPA, and TB; 4) identify leadership staff of the mental health clinics who then inform, promote, and sustain the program; and 5) extend the training on and implementation of trauma-informed, evidence-based services beyond Community PARTNERS into the Queens and eastern Brooklyn communities.

In 2007, the program expanded to include a second site at the Child Abuse Program at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters (CHKD) in Norfolk, Virginia. The CHKD site is implementing the project with military families. This collaboration allows the NCTSN to gain information on working with traumatized children from military families, and provides the opportunity for creating collaborations among trauma providers and military service providers (e.g., Family Advocacy Program, Portsmouth Naval Hospital, Naval Criminal Investigative Services). Finally, given the mobile nature of military family life, the collaboration will help provide additional information on methods of adapting the evidence-based services to improve access among military children (e.g., cross-site trainings or improved continuity of care among service providers at different commands).

The Children's Trauma Institute (CTI), a collaboration between the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM) and the New York City Administration for Children's Services (ACS), operates an NCTSN Treatment and Service Adaptation (TSA) Center that is dedicated to developing, adapting, evaluating, and disseminating evidence-based trauma-informed interventions for use with child welfare populations. The CTI currently has several projects—currently in various stages of implementation—that address opportunities at different key points in the child welfare system.

In the area of preventive services, the institute is working to establish a stakeholder learning community in the neighborhood of East Harlem that will design, implement, and evaluate an evidence-based trauma-informed intervention for families receiving preventive services in which the mother has a history of trauma exposure and significant posttraumatic stress disorder symptomatology. This project will adapt the STAIR (Skills Training in Affect and Interpersonal Regulation) intervention model to improve parenting capacity and to prevent maltreatment and removal of children from their families.

The CTI's foster care project includes two components: an early intervention with children who have just been removed from their families (designed to assist the children in managing the trauma associated with removal), and an intervention that supports children and foster care parents in adapting successfully to the early phase of placement in foster care. This project will be in collaboration with the Children's Center in Manhattan.

Finally, the institute will work with other NCTSN Centers to develop and disseminate resiliency interventions for child protective services workers. These interventions were pilot-tested in Manhattan, and measure job satisfaction, burnout, optimism, resilience, reactivity to stressful events, and staff support.

The Center for Trauma Program Innovation at the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services (JBFCS) develops, improves, and disseminates trauma-focused assessment and treatment services for traumatized children and adults, with special emphasis on those from low-income and racially diverse neighborhoods who have been exposed to interpersonal and community violence, and present with both acute and chronic traumatic stress consequences.

The center builds the evidence base for promising treatments for trauma in collaboration with other NCTSN member sites, as well as with JBFCS programs. It works to build the capacity of organizations to provide best practices in assessing and treating trauma, and to field-test trauma services. Working with the New York City mental health, child welfare, and educational systems, the center enhances the ability of professionals within these systems to provide trauma-informed services to the city's children; and reaches out to businesses and community organizations to provide guidance on workplace psychological preparedness, active coping, and crisis intervention.

The Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Centers (BI-SLR) HEARTS program will treat children, youth, and families involved in child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and children/youth of military families—increasing the number who receive culturally competent, evidence-based, trauma-informed services in Beth Israel outpatient clinics and at partner agencies. BI-SLR HEARTS will deliver Attachment, Self-Regulation, and Competency (ARC) for children aged 5–18 with complex trauma and their families, and Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) for younger children and their caregivers. During the grant period, the program will serve children, youth, and families by screening 6,075; assessing 638; and treating 338. In addition, BI-SLR HEARTS will: 1) train 12 partners; 2) collaborate with SAMHSA and NCTSN to disseminate NCTSN products and participate in NCTSN-Ied activities; and 3) increase awareness of child traumatic stress in multiple child-serving systems and promote trauma-informed policies.

Originally founded as an orphanage, the Andrus Children's Center is a treatment, education, and research facility that serves families and children through campus-based programs, community-based initiatives, and mental health programs. The use of the Sanctuary Model of trauma-informed residential care is a key feature of Andrus's work. Andrus joined the NCTSN as a member of the Children's Trauma Consoritum of Westchester, a collaborative with the Center for Preventive Psychiatry, Fordham University's Children's First, and the Westchester Medical Center's Behavioral Health Center.

North Shore University Hospital's Adolescent Trauma Treatment Development Center (ATTDC) helps alleviate the impact of traumatic stress on adolescents. The center develops, adapts, and disseminates Structured Psychotherapy for Adolescents Responding to Chronic Stress (SPARCS), its primary group intervention method for adolescents. ATTDC also created an Adolescent Traumatic Stress Resource Center for professionals, teens, and families, which includes the development of web-based resources for these audiences. An additional priority for ATTDC is collaborating with Network members to create a treatment model based on Psychological First Aid for the state health system to better respond to the mental health needs of children and families after disasters or terrorist attacks.

The NYU Center on Coordinated Trauma Services (NYU CCTS) in Child Welfare and Mental Health will be developed by the New York University Child Study Center, in collaboration with the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH) and the New York City Administration on Children's Services (ACS).The NYC CCTS will be an NCTSN Treatment and Services Adaptation (TSA) Center focusing on child abuse services, Child Protective Services, and child welfare. The overarching aims are to provide national expertise, and to support the specialized adaptation of effective treatment and service approaches for children and families with trauma-related mental health needs in the child welfare system across the United States. The four main goals are to: 1) raise public awareness of the scope and serious impact of child traumatic stress on children and families in the child welfare system; 2) disseminate effective services and interventions that improve the standard of care for children and families in the child welfare system; 3) advance the capacity of and improve processes in the child welfare system so that the needs of children and families can be better served; and 4) foster a community dedicated to collaboration within and beyond the NCTSN so that knowledge of the needs of children and families in the child welfare system can be improved over time, and so that interventions and services designed to meet these needs can have the greatest possible impact.