Building a Trauma-Informed Organization 2025

February 19 and 20, 2025
UAMS invites you to the second year of Building a Trauma-Informed Organization, a 2-day conference geared to help children 5 and under who have experienced trauma.

Who should attend? New attendees as well as those who came last year are invited to this professional development event. The conference will benefit agency heads and individuals who work in family support services, early childcare, training and employment programs, the justice system, WIC, SNAP, DCFS, early intervention and home visiting.

Please note that you may attend either day or both.

On Day One, learn the research behind positive childhood experiences and the building blocks of the Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences (HOPE) framework. Paired with the Strengthening Families framework and other resources, you will be prepared to put HOPE into practice.

Attendees will also rotate through these three breakout sessions.
Using HOPE to Promote Access to the Building Blocks

This training will help you evaluate the current formal and informal resources that promote resilience in your community. You’ll also work as a group to understand the barriers to these resources and make plans to remove the barriers you can control.

Learning Objectives:
Review available resources in your community

Consider who might experience barriers to the building blocks in your community and make a plan to reduce these barriers
Creating an Internal Culture of HOPE
Staff trained on the HOPE framework is important, but we have also heard many times that staff training without leadership change is not sustainable. If staff understand how to implement HOPE, but there isn’t an organizational culture that reflects those values back to them, it’s likely they will return to business as usual without weaving the HOPE concepts into their work. That’s why it’s crucial to build an internal culture of HOPE as a support system for staff.

Learning Objectives:
Determine three ways you can promote access to the building blocks for staff
Practice offering supervision through a HOPE-informed lens
Draft a department meeting agenda that prioritizes the key concepts of HOPE
HOPEful Policies
The organizational policies that guide our day-to-day practice could promote access to the four building blocks. However, policies are often created when things aren’t going well -- people are late to visits which impacts the provider’s schedule, a child is having behavioral challenges in a classroom, a family is unable to pay for their services. When policies are developed in a reactionary fashion to solve a problem, they may block access to one or more of the building blocks. We’ll talk about how you can assess your existing policies to make sure they are HOPE-informed.

Learning Objectives:
Understand how to evaluate a policy through a HOPE-informed lens
Practice evaluating sample policies
Commit to reviewing one policy when you return to work

Day Two offers CE-CERT training (Components for Enhancing Career Experience and Reducing Trauma). This is a suite of skills to support well-being in professionals exposed to secondary trauma. The goal of CE-CERT is not merely to help professionals survive this work. Rather, the goal is to support professionals to have a vocation that is uniquely and deeply satisfying. CE-CERT goes beyond the usual discussion of secondary traumatic stress and burnout to provide specific, practical skills that can be applied to the very real stress that is produced by this work. Note: This is the same training offered in the 2024 conference.

Funded by the Division of Elementary & Secondary Education, Office of Early Childhood.

Host or Publisher University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences