Trauma-Informed and Healing Centered Tools, Trainings, and Research
CTI Chicago Resources
We seek to create responsive systems and healing-centered communities within our city, while striving to support individuals, advocates, and practitioners. CTI Chicago has curated a wide range of trauma-focused resources, tools, and educational opportunities, created by Chicago partners, and trauma-informed initiatives across the country. For convenience, resources are grouped by categories, and include a brief description.
- What is Trauma?
This site is intended for those just learning about trauma: its definitions, effects, and the science around it.
via the Trauma-Informed Care Implementation Resource Center - Understanding the Effects of Trauma on Health
This is a concise factsheet outlining what childhood trauma is, how it can impact physical and behavioral health outcomes, and how providers and advocates can implement effective solutions.
via the Center for Health Care Strategies - What is Secondary Trauma?
This site includes explanations and examples of secondary trauma (the emotional distress that happens when we hear about or witness another person's traumatic experience, includes a short video and links to related resources.
via the THEN Center: The Center for Collaborative Study of Trauma, Health Equity, and Neurobiology - A Guide for Youth: Understanding Trauma
This guide is designed to help youth make a connection between stressful events and the potential lasting impacts. Understanding trauma and having a framework to talk about past experiences can help in processing and asking for help.
via Youth M.O.V.E. National - REACH Learning and Resource Hub
This hub provides free, virtual on-demand learning and education resources to help educators, clinicians, parents, and caregivers better support the mental health and resilience of the children and youth in their communities. It focuses on trauma-responsive practices and policies, and fosters personal and professional resilience, social-emotional awareness and self-care.
via the Center for Childhood Resilience
- Trauma-informed care champions: From Treaters to Healers
This site hosts short videos featuring practitioners from The Bronx, Philadelphia, and San Francisco who are leading a movement to improve health care for patients who have experienced trauma.
via the Trauma-Informed Care Implementation Resource Center - Behaviors and Actions of Trauma Informed Leaders
This is a summary of data on what trauma informed care looks like in leadership, among staff, and in an organization.
via Trauma Informed Oregon - Key Ingredients for Successful Trauma-Informed Care Implementation
This brief draws on interviews with national experts on trauma-informed care to create a framework for organizational and clinical changes that can be practically implemented across the health care sector to address trauma.
via the Center for Health Care Strategies - Five How-Tos of Trauma-Informed Practice
A guide for service providers seeking to understand and support the impact of trauma on clients.
via the Health & Medicine Policy Research Group - Practical Guide for Implementing a Trauma-Informed Approach
This comprehensive guide highlights the need for organizational assessment of readiness and capacity before implementing a trauma-informed approach and describes strategies for such assessments. The guide focuses on implementation strategies across the following 10 domains including finance, policy, and physical environment,
via SAMSHA - Incorporating Patients’ Voices at the Women’s HIV Program: University of California, San Francisco
Case study in engaging patients in all aspects of treatment and organizational process.
via the Center for Health Care Strategies - Gender affirming care is trauma-informed care
Transgender, gender diverse and intersex youth experience trauma, discrimination, and health disparities at higher rates than their cisgender peers, including disproportionate rates of negative behavioral health outcomes and higher rates of attempted suicide. This brief provides guidance for health care providers on providing gender-affirming care.
via the Center for Health Care Strategies - Trauma-Informed Approaches for Supporting Families with Opioid Misuse
This paper provides an overview of trauma and adverse childhood experiences, as well as how opioid misuse is both associated with past trauma in the home and community and correlated with increased risk of future poor health and social outcomes.
via the Health & Medicine Policy Research Group - Workforce Wellness and Organizational Change
Multiple resources to promote and ensure workforce wellness for those confronting trauma in the workplace
via Trauma Informed Chicago - Support for Public Health Workers and Health Professionals
Tips for identifying and managing stress for health professionals and their managers.
via the Centers for Disease Control
- Supporting Trauma-Informed Schools to Keep Students in the Classroom
Promising trauma-informed practices that were tested and implemented in five school- and district-based sites.
via The National Child Traumatic Stress Network - Trauma-informed Schools
There is a growing movement in schools nationwide to become trauma-informed. This report explains the why and how of trauma-informed schools and provides concrete rationale, possible action steps, and examples for creating thriving school environments.
via the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice
- Trauma-informed Policy Making Tool
This Trauma-Informed Policymaking Tool adapts the six principles of the trauma-informed approach from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and can be applied to policy issues across all sectors.
via HMPRG - Whole Child Task Force Report
The Whole Child Task Force Report provides recommendations in establishing an equitable, inclusive, safe, and supportive environment in all schools for every student in Illinois
via the Illinois State Board of Education - Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect: A Technical Package for Policy, Norm and Programmatic Activities
A guide that outlines a series of potential technical interventions to address child abuse and neglect, primarily focused on the policy level, including bolstering economic, parental, and educational support for families. Each intervention is broken down by its strategy, approach, and evidence.
via the Centers for Disease Control - Fostering Equity: Creating Shared Understanding for Building Community Resilience
Learning modules and other tools for mapping out the collective experience of oppressive systems and policies, as well as the inequitable social structures that exacerbate individual traumas.
via the Centers for Disease Control
- Historical Trauma and Cultural Healing
Video series and discussion questions to answer the questions: What is historical trauma? How do people and communities experience it? And how can reconnecting to cultural practices help families and communities heal?
via the University of Minnesota Extension - How does trauma spill from one generation to the next?
Article on the current research documenting and explaining generational and collective trauma and how to cope with it.
via the Washington Post - How Racism Makes Us Sick
David R. Williams developed a scale to measure the impact of discrimination on well-being, going beyond traditional measures like income and education to reveal how factors like implicit bias, residential segregation and negative stereotypes create and sustain inequality. In this eye-opening talk, Williams presents evidence for how racism is producing a rigged system -- and offers hopeful examples of programs across the US that are working to dismantle discrimination.
via TED Talks - Segregation Stress Syndrome
Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller discusses “Segregation Stress Syndrome”–the chronic, enduring, and painful responses to collective trauma that occurred during Jim Crow, the effects of which are still felt today. This intergenerational transmission of trauma creates risk factors for young African Americans in their interactions with police and other systems in the modern world.
via HMPRG
- How Connection to Culture and Community Can Heal Wounds
Reconnecting people to the vibrant strengths of their ancestry and culture, helping people process the grief of past traumas, and creating new historical narratives can have healing effects for those experiencing historical trauma.
via the University of Minnesoa Extension - Widening the Lens on ACEs: The Role of Community in Trauma, Resilience, and Thriving
This policy brief examines the role that community contexts and structural forces play in contributing to trauma and models for community resilience to counter those impacts.
via HMPRG
- We Can Prevent Childhood Adversity: Understanding ACES
"Visual, interactive representation of data from the 1995-1997 CDC-Kaiser Permanente study on ACEs prevalence and relationship to health outcomes."
via the Centers for Disease Control - Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
A deep dive into ACES and links to scholarly resources focused on specific aspects related to ACEs.
via the Children's Bureau
- Preventing and Healing Trauma
A curated set of resources for preventing and healing trauma.
via the THEN Center - Youth Risk and Protective Factors
This page idenitifies individual and community ACES risk factors, those that increase the likelihood of experiencing an ACE, and protective factors, those that decrease the likelihood of occurrence and potential negative effects.
via the CDC - Protective Factors to Promote Well-Being and Prevent Child Abuse & Neglect
A detailed explanation of, and additional resources on, protective facts that can prevent child abuse and promote wellbeing.
via the Children's Bureau - The Resilience Tree
A 90-minute webinar that dives into using “The Resilience Tree” as a tool to frame, implement, and measure community-level resilience and positive childhood experiences. Links include a worksheet and tutorial.
via the Center for Community Resilience
