Resilient & Trauma-Informed Communities (RTIC)

Coalitions That Adopted

Strategy Type

School-based & Community-based

Strategy Goal

Reduce the number of middle and high school-age youth who are at risk for depression as reported on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS).

Intended Population

Communities and organizations across La Crosse County.

Strategy Background

In La Crosse County, the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) revealed that nearly one-third of county high school students reported feeling so sad and hopeless that it was impacting their daily lives. In addition, data showed students were feeling less connected to their school environments than previous years. The insights contained in the YRBS report reflected the need to increase youth protective factors to help them face their life stresses, overcome adversity, and ultimately to improve their mental health. Understanding that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress are the greatest risk factors for youth mental health challenges, the La Crosse County coalition, Better Together, aimed to raise awareness of the impact they have on mental wellness. With the knowledge that their work could have a greater impact, the coalition adopted a multi-sector collective impact approach – meaning they brought multiple organizations together under a common goal – to expand their focus from youth to the community at large. By building resilience and being more trauma-informed as a community, Better Together worked to address the negative effects of trauma, stress, and ACEs altogether.

Building a Resilient and Trauma-Informed Community (RTIC) means educating the community on ACEs and growing the general awareness around the role trauma plays in personal development. Resilience is defined as the ability to adapt, bounce back, and cope with adversity, trauma, and stress. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 61% of adults in the U.S. have experienced at least one ACE and 16% have experienced 4 or more types of ACEs in their lives. What many people do not realize is that exposure to ACEs is associated with increased risk for health problems across one’s lifespan. Recognizing the impact of ACEs and toxic stress is the first step to building resilience.

Resilience can be further developed through healthy and supportive relationships, as well as by recognizing personal needs and taking the appropriate steps to get help. The RTIC framework developed by Better Together and its network of partners is meant to build a community that is connected, healthy, equitable, and resilient.

RTIC Wheel Through the use of a volunteer support team that plans trainings, hosts educational sessions and meetings, RTIC participants were able to stay connected and learn from each other as they learned new practices and implemented them within their organizations. The diverse makeup of RTIC allowed the group to keep an ear to the public’s needs, enabling its collective work to change and grow over time in response to those needs.

The “Kaleidoscope of Change” RTIC Framework consists of four commitments made to the community:

Building a Foundation: Establish common language and understanding to support trauma-informed values, actions, and systems.
Disrupting the Cycle: Reduce childhood exposure to trauma through prevention and early intervention.
Strengthening Resilience: Enhance protective factors to help people bounce back and reduce the risk of poor health outcomes resulting from trauma and ACE exposure.
Restoring Lives: Integrate accessible and effective supports that foster healing and recovery.

As a first step to fostering an RTIC, the coalition developed the Foundations Training to educate participants about shared community efforts, the impact of trauma, the role of resilience, and the importance of empathy in strengthening resilience. The training is designed to encourage community members, especially those working with youth-serving organizations, to become RTIC Champions, who commit to continuing the effort in their personal and professional work.

Did you know: Schools and youth serving agencies have used RTIC to train staff and engage parents.

Strategy

In order to successfully create an RTIC in your community, Better Together has listed the following core components to guide you. While these items were key to the coalition’s success in La Crosse County, you should consider what changes might be necessary based on the needs and behavioral health environment of your own community.

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Build a Support Team

By leveraging community networks and organizational partnerships from a wide range of sectors, you should recruit a team of volunteers interested in being active in the community to promote the work and facilitate training sessions as trainers. Support Team members will define project goals, identify improvement opportunities, coordinate and facilitate meetings, and engage the community.

Tip: Each member of the Support Team should have a clearly defined role and responsibilities to ensure a cohesive structure where efforts are supportive and not duplicated.

Role Descriptions (PDF)

Pilot the Training

Piloting the training is critical to ensuring it functions as intended and allows you to fix any flaws before engaging the community and promoting it. The process involves trainers taking a practice run through the training with a small audience of peers and seeking input on ways to improve.

Train the Trainers

Once you have identified individuals to become trainers, coordinate a series of meetings for them to review background materials and practice facilitating. At these meetings, trainers should receive all necessary training material, including handouts, a file copy of the film, and the presentation slide deck.

RTIC Foundations Training Slide Deck (PDF)
KPRJ Full Film Guide (PDF)
Foundations Facilitator Guide (PDF)

Leverage Personal and Professional Networks

Building relationships with public mental health departments and local businesses is crucial to successfully implementing the RTIC strategy. Growing relationships early on can pave the way for an organization to embed resilient and trauma-informed practices into their work. These relationships will also aid in bringing additional organizations into the program and may assist in workshopping your program tools to ensure adoption and use of the practices.

Promote the Training

Once trainers have been prepared, you are ready to promote the Foundations Training. Reach out to individuals in your community network, such as businesses, community-based organizations, schools, and other youth-serving organizations to garner interest. To generate media buzz, consider reaching out to local news organizations for earned media opportunities in print, digital, tv, and radio.

Coordinate Logistics

After you’ve confirmed an organization’s interest in hosting a Foundations Training, coordinate the details with your contact. You should relay to them who is going to present the training and what time and day it will take place. Make sure they provide you with information on where the training will be held and the number of participants, ensuring that the room has the capabilities to project a presentation and the capacity to hold a set number of people.

Conduct the Training

Now that the groundwork has been laid, you are ready to conduct the Foundations Training. The training should be facilitated as follows:

Hold discussion and education session on ACEs, toxic stress, and resilience;
Show the film, “Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope” in segments with reflections at indicated film times;
Discuss how to apply what was learned to personal and professional lives and share tools for resilience building; and
Discuss the RTIC Framework and how your community utilizes the framework to work on building trauma-informed organizations and systems.

Note: Better Together anchored their education of ACEs and initiated its discussion on how to promote resiliency through the documentary, “Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope.”

Identify Champions

After the Foundations Training session, offer participants the opportunity to take action in their personal or professional lives through a “Network of Champions.” Champions will act as RTIC ambassadors, using their connections and professional experience to lead and coach their organization through practices, procedures, and policies that align their work with the RTIC framework.

RTIC Organization Structure

Gather Feedback

After the training has been conducted, administer your feedback form. Consider working directly with an organization’s leadership to demonstrate where growth occurred after the training and learn about their next steps in organizational change.

Conduct Facilitator Training

Once you’ve identified a group of Resilience Champions, train them to become facilitators of the Foundations Training, providing participants the tools and resources to conduct the training in their own communities and workplaces.

Network of Champion Sessions

Through individual or group sessions, connect with Champions to build a community of practice, allowing individuals across sectors to gather, exchange ideas and practices, as well as research and resources in an effort to learn different ways to build an RTIC. These Champions will act as ambassadors, using their connections and professional capacity to align the RTIC framework with their organization’s practices. This ensures that work being conducted across organizations is mutually supporting and directed towards a common goal.

Challenges and Tactics to Address Them

Navigating successful strategy implementation can be complex, and obstacles will arise that set your plan back.

List of Challenges and Tactics

From distinguishing your initiative from others in the community to ensuring the strategy is continuously improving, the path forward can often be uncertain and challenging. The following section includes common challenges faced when creating and implementing an RTIC and tactics recommended by Better Together to address them and pave the way for successful implementation.

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Distinguishing RTIC from Other Initiatives

With a number of other mental health-focused trainings likely available in your area, you will need to distinguish your offering from others in order for the community to differentiate between them and determine which best suits their needs.

Note: Two of the biggest distinguishers of the RTIC work are that it is intended to be for whole organizations - not just individuals - and the Foundations Training focuses on prevention and supporting community members to positively impact their mental well-being in the long-term.

Continuous Improvement

In a volunteer-based project, competing priorities will arise from different aspects of the work. In order to remain on target and maintain a cohesive Support Team, internal strategic planning sessions should be held to identify priorities that are consistently communicated to team members, ensuring the full group is informed and working together towards a common goal.

RTIC Statistics

300+

RTIC Champions in the community

2,000+

Foundations Training participants

Best Practices

Through the process of implementing their respective behavioral health strategies, each AHW-funded coalition recorded its lessons learned to streamline their strategy processes going forward. Tried-and-true best practices also enhance the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes. The following section includes an insightful list of learned best practices Better Together recommends other organizations employ to steer their strategies toward successful implementation.

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Support Champions Over Time

Holding consultations with Champions well after a Foundations Training allows your work to spread beyond your immediate reach. Champions serve key roles in leading the integration of resilience-building and trauma-informed practices within their businesses or organizations as well as engaging in collective systems change work with others in the community.

Build Planning Guides

During one-on-one consultations with Champions, assist them in building out a planning guide, effectively giving their organizations a place to start.

RTIC: Organization Planning Guide (PDF)

Develop Informational Website

To support your work, you can develop a website that serves as a central location for resources, such as project information, educational materials, and calendar events. The website can also be used to streamline the training registration process.

Resilient Communities WI