Hannah Swift, Director of Community Outreach and Training
Gracehaven is committed to providing high-quality care to the youth we serve. Our team is continuously learning and striving to implement best practices in our work. This fall, our team had two unique opportunities to go deeper in our learning.
TBRI Training
In October, Gracehaven hosted author, speaker, consultant, and lived experience expert, Toni McKinley, for an in-depth, two-day Trust Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) staff training.
TBRI® is an attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention that is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. TBRI is specifically designed to equip adults to care for children coming from hard places.
The vast majority of the youth Gracehaven serves have experienced multiple forms of trauma; trauma literally changes the neural pathways of the brain and greatly impacts how the body experiences life, especially relationships.
We know that some of the best healing work happens in the context of relationships; that’s why Gracehaven utilizes a highly-relational model in our service provision. It is critical that our staff be equipped to understand the impact of trauma and empowered to respond in ways that foster these healing relationships. TBRI is a powerful tool in helping us accomplish this.
Based on years of research about sensory processing and neuroscience, TBRI includes principles to empower youth, disarm fear-based behaviors, address physical needs and provide meaningful connection. TBRI co-creator, Karyn Purvis, once said, “If I could tell you my dream … it would be to imagine a world where the cry of every child is met by a loving compassionate adult. Giving voice to children is the heart and soul of what we do.”
To learn more about TBRI, check out this short video from the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development.
JUST Conference
Also this fall, Gracehaven leadership attended the nation’s leading conference on juvenile sex trafficking (Shared Hope International’s JUST Conference held this year in Orlando, FL). JUST aims to provide advocates and organizations like Gracehaven with practical knowledge and actionable responses to raise awareness and ultimately end human trafficking in local communities.
We attended sessions focused on the intersectionality of foster care and trafficking; decriminalization efforts to support victims; effective collaboration; AI and sextortion; prevention education; demand reduction and more. It was so inspiring to be surrounded by others in our field representing multiple disciplines – child welfare, juvenile justice, law enforcement, etc. – and to get to work with direct service providers, advocates, federal investigators, researchers, and most importantly, lived experience experts.
It was also encouraging to interact at the JUST conference with our partners from the Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force, Hamilton County Juvenile Court, the Ohio Department of Youth Services, the National Council for Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking.
Gracehaven was among these passionate leaders, returning to Ohio with great insights for more effectively serving at-risk and exploited youth and families across our state. We look forward to implementing what we learned into our teams’ efforts to strengthen our clinical services, group home operations and community outreach.