Our Trauma-Informed Policymaking Tool outlines a policy approach to preventing and healing from trauma. The two-page Tool defines trauma-informed principles and describe their application to both the process of policymaking and its outcome.

How can you provide client-centered, trauma-informed services so that clients are treated with the dignity that all people deserve? Developed in partnership with Collaborative member Sarah Hess, Five How-Tos of Trauma-Informed Practice provides strategies you can use today to make your services more trauma-informed.

In this toolkit, you will find some ways you and your organization can support a trauma-informed Illinois. While this toolkit was developed for Illinois' inaugural Trauma-Informed Awareness Day on Wednesday, May 15, we hope that these resources and ideas will be helpful for others in the field.

Links to reports, videos, and research that provides introductory information about ACEs, trauma-informed care, and resilience.

In this webinar, Andrea Ortez of Partnership for Resilience discusses how organizers, educators, and clinicians can utilize community partnerships to provide trauma-informed support to both teachers and students. Ortez addressed the early lessons of the Partnership and the types of relationships that practitioners, educators, and advocates must foster together to ensure the needs of the whole child are met.

An increasing number of organizations, institutions, and sectors are committing to responding to trauma and adverse childhood experiences to better support the people they employ and serve. As we think about how best to promote resilience and thriving, we need to zoom out beyond the individual and consider the role of community contexts and structural forces both in contributing to trauma and promoting healing. This report explore how the lens of community resilience can support community building initiatives and systems-level change that can prevent trauma, mitigate its impact, and interrupt its transmission from one generation to the next.

Working at the intersection of trauma, health equity, and law, attorney Sarah Hess joins the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative to talk about ways advocates from all disciplines can use a trauma-informed approach to help their clients thrive.

Learn how health departments across the country and in Illinois are engaging in trauma-informed work. Brenda Bannor of Millennia Consulting presenta the results of the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative’s recent environmental scan of health departments doing this work nationally. The webinar concludes with a panel discussion featuring local health departments to hear successes and lessons learned from implementation.

In June 2018, Health & Medicine Policy Research Group (Health & Medicine) and the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative conducted an environmental scan of health departments across the country that are undertaking a systems change approach towards trauma-informed care. The scan identifies and analyzes common themes across these health departments. Findings will be used to better support health departments across the state of Illinois that are beginning or advancing their journey towards becoming trauma-informed.

In this webinar from the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative, Dr. Carole Warshaw, of the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health, and Gwendolyn Packard of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center discuss the intersection between opioid usage and intergenerational trauma.