ARC Implementation Projects

One Hope United is a child welfare agency that provides a wide range of services including child development, placement, residential services, and community based counseling services. The agency has offices across Illinois, southeastern Wisconsin, Florida and Missouri. One Hope United staff were first trained in the Northern Illinois area in 2011. Three staff participated in a two day training, and all of the counseling staff participated in subsequent monthly consultation calls over the next year. In 2012 ARC was written into the agency’s proposal for a NCTSN category trauma treatment program, The Healing Path, and was funded. The agency sponsored a two day training and year long follow up consultation for agencies in the Lake County area and also had yearly training provided by JRI staff.

As a result of these experiences, the agency is now in the process of implementing ARC across all of its programs. We have ARC language in supervisory meetings, and discuss its application to children and families who are involved not only in community counseling but juvenile justice, child welfare, and residential referrals as well. In addition, the agency has taken on a commitment to becoming a trauma informed organization as a result of this involvement, and has recognized the need for trauma informed, developmentally appropriate approaches to be used in all programs. As part of the Healing Path, a number of paper and pencil instruments were used to evaluate the approach. The preliminary data indicate that ARC is highly effective across all populations as demonstrated by reductions in symptoms on the Child Behavior Checklist, completed by parents, and the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths Scale (CANS) completed by the clinician. In addition, client and parent satisfaction surveys indicate a very high degree of satisfaction with the program (90%) with parents indicating that the approach has helped to reduce the symptoms that brought the family into therapy.

For further information about One Hope United, please visit the website or contact Liza Simon-Roper at [email protected].

Mercy Home is a residential treatment center in Chicago, IL that provides a safe haven for young people ages 11-21 who have experienced a variety of traumatic events and life challenges. Our agency includes 13 residential treatment programs, nine for boys and four for girls, as well as an independent living program for young men and women ages 18-24.

Mercy Home began implementation of the ARC framework in the fall of 2014 in order to refine our conceptual framework of care and align our work with evidence-supported practices. We chose ARC because, although our staff members were generally philosophically aligned with attachment and trauma-informed principles, our framework lacked the shared accessible language, clear practices, and broader community provided by the ARC framework. Our implementation process is ongoing and has involved a variety of components, including: leadership book groups, agency-wide training, direct-care champion groups, monthly clinical case consultation calls, and extensive work to align our outcomes, training curricula, and general policies with the framework.

Our implementation process has resulted in a variety of changes across our programs. We’ve reworked our conceptual framework, The Mercy Model of Care, with ARC as the primary guiding framework and lens for our clinical decision-making. Our direct-care teams have embraced their roles as innovators in integrating ARC language and concepts into daily life in our treatment milieu. Youth and staff can regularly be overheard discussing energy needs and regulation strategies. Our relationships with our partner schools have been solidified through sharing the ARC lens. Currently, we are undertaking a project to review many of our rules and consequences to explore their treatment utility in effectively responding to youth behaviors.

While a quantitative analysis is premature, we’ve seen a variety of indicators, throughout implementation, that the framework is improving our treatment environment. Many of our veteran staff have reported appreciating the shared language and simplicity of the framework. We continue to see a decrease in staff reliance on more restrictive physical interventions and punitive consequences and a greater focus on what our staff call “CPRs” – Coping, Process, Repair. We’ve also found that it is much easier to help our youth and families understand our treatment philosophy as well as to explain the key components of our work to community partners.

For further information about Mercy Home, please visit their website.

Eliot is a large and diverse human services non profit, recently expanded through a merger with MSPCC.
Our Child, Youth and Family Services include expansive community based and residential services, including over 30 sites and 35 distinct programs, and service thousands of children and families each year, many of whom have been impacted by complex trauma.  Eliot was first formally exposed to ARC in 2013 as a handful of staff from our In Home Therapy program were trained and participated in an Intensive Learning Community, while simultaneously committing to agency-level trauma informed system change.

Through collaboration with Dr. Joseph Spinazzola and Margaret Blaustein at The Trauma Center at JRI, Eliot has committed to ARC as a cornerstone of trauma informed and evidence based practice.  Following multiple rounds of basic and advanced ARC training and consultation, Eliot infused ARC into division-specific models of care and developed internally sustainable ARC training and multiple tracks of intensive learning community style consultation, including a specialized adaptations for Juvenile Justice, Caring Together, and In Home Therapy programming. Over 85% of veteran staff have been trained, and all incoming staff dating back to April 2015, have received a 2 day Trauma Informed Care and ARC training. Eliot’s Outpatient Clinic in Everett is one of three sites selected to participate in the first ever ARC Randomized Control Trial.  While formal outcome measurement is still in process, it is clear that the infusion of ARC at Eliot has had a profoundly positive impact of staff, children, youth and families.

For additional information about Eliot Human Services, please visit their website.

Crittenton Children’s Center became keenly aware of the overwhelming toxic stress and traumatic events experienced by young children and families through our therapeutic work in Head Start programs. With the support of the Trauma Center-Justice Resource Institute, Crittenton combined our early childhood experience with the Attachment, Self-regulation and Competency (ARC) Framework, to create a model that builds trauma informed educational communities that can effectively meet the needs of young children and the caregivers who love and care for them. From teachers to bus drivers to parents, Trauma Smart® (TS) gives every adult in the school community the understanding and practical skills needed to help every child thrive. Over the last three years, TS has impacted 156 Head Start classrooms across Missouri. Trauma Smart® gains additional national presence day by day. We are currently committed to early childhood and elementary school implementation sites in Missouri, Kansas, Alaska, Washington, Michigan, Wisconsin, Tennessee and New York City – a combined impact of 35,630 children.

Trauma Smart® classrooms consistently show improvement in behavior management, positive classroom environment, productivity, language modeling, regard for student perspectives and quality of feedback. For children receiving individual therapy services, 100% with externalized behaviors and 61% with internalized behaviors improved from clinical to normal range. The response from teachers and parents has been overwhelmingly positive. As one teacher stated, “I felt all alone in the classroom. I really thought these kids’ issues were too big for me to handle. Now I have ARC tools that really help.”

For additional information on Crittenton’s Trauma Smart program, please visit their website.

Young Adult Services (YAS) is a program within the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) that provides outpatient and transitional services to young adults ages 18-25 with significant mental health challenges.  Our program is a statewide network of mental health providers who specialize in the developmental challenges of young adulthood as well as the impact of severe childhood adversity faced by many of our clients.  YAS leadership endeavored to implement ARC to all our providers as part of our goal of increasing trauma-informed practice.  We rolled out ARC in two training phases in an on-going three-year project.  Staff attended the two-day foundational training, a ten-session in-house ARC module curriculum, as well as twice-monthly phone consultation that emphasized implementation and advanced clinical practices. We were particularly interested in increasing our attunement and formulation skills while also offering flexible, practical, and developmentally meaningful interventions for our young adults.   Since we began this process, the first cohort (five of our ten training sites) has completed the ARC consultation and is developing sustainability plans that target trauma assessment, ongoing staff training and supervision, and milieu interventions that will cultivate a trauma-informed and therapeutic culture statewide.  Our staff have increased their ability to see clients through a trauma lens and are already seeing gains in our clients’ behavioral and emotional regulation as a result of their enhanced abilities to be attuned and able to offer helpful modulation strategies. For more information about the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services’ Young Adult Services Division, go to our website.

 

The Lincoln County Department of Social Services, specifically, the foster care and adoption programs, provided specialized training to our licensed foster families through the ARC model. The families that participated have the privilege of caring for children between the ages of birth and 21 who are in custody of our agency. Implementation of this training program included 26 foster parents and 12 staff members. One of the goals was to raise awareness of the effects that trauma has on our children, with the hope that this understanding would prevent or significantly decrease the amount of disruptions that our children experience. Separate trainings were held for foster parents and case managers. In an attempt to share the foster parent’s experiences, the staff trainer attended the parent sessions as an observer and relayed the information gathered to the case managers.  Implementation and planning saw partnerships formed between our agency and the broader community.  While the training itself, nurtured friendships between individual foster families.

As a result of this training, relationships between the case managers and the foster families have strengthened. Foster parents now have a stronger understanding of the effects of trauma as it relates to the children’s behaviors.  With a better understanding, most families have recognized how change can cause children to re-experience past trauma and are more committed to preventing disruptions in the lives of our children.