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.

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.

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

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.

Health & Medicine and our Center for Long-Term Care Reform have long been committed to improving the way older adults in Illinois live and enjoy their final years with dignity in their homes and communities. With a new administration in place, Health & Medicine intends to take action to ensure that aging issues are prioritized by the new Pritzker administration, as well as advocating nationally for adequate funding and rational policies to support home and community-based services and supports. To that end, we are pleased to share our Aging in Illinois: 2019 Agenda for Change. The Agenda highlights five issues—workforce,Medicaid managed care, nursing home safety and accountability, livable communities for all, growing population of aging immigrants—based on their overall importance and potential for immediate impact.

On Wednesday, December 12th, 2018, Health & Medicine held a town hall meeting, Creating a Healthy Equity Agenda for Chicago’s Elections, part of our Chicago Forum for Justice in Health Policy series. Attendees were asked to identify overarching problems within their sectors and discuss their impact at different levels of government—neighborhood, city, county, regional, state, and national. This report summarizes the most emergent issues and recommendations shared by participants. The report is divided into ten areas, each listing Issues and Needs as well as Policy Ideas and Approaches.

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.

Health & Medicine Policy Research Group launched its Behavioral Health-Primary Care Integration Learning Collaborative in 2015. The Learning Collaborative set up a Hospital Transitional Care Workgroup to focus on the potential to improve outcomes for individuals returning to the community after inpatient behavioral health hospital admissions. After many in-depth discussions, the Workgroup began collecting data on hospital transitions. This data collection project concentrated attention on the processes of transitional care, where they breakdown, and how they may be improved. This paper summarizes the Workgroup’s conclusions.

This resource from Chicago AHEC in collaboration with Keeayla Jones at Illinois Student Assistance Commission provides helpful information about FAFSA, MAP grants, and the other systems college applicants need to navigate to fund their education.

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.