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Trauma Informed Oregon, TIC Principles, and COVID-19
Trauma Informed Oregon, TIC Principles, and COVID-19
From Mandy Davis, LCSW, PhD, Director, Trauma Informed Oregon
Please view this vlog to see what Trauma Informed Oregon is focusing on as the impact of COVID-19 unfolds. This video is 5:23 minutes.
Ways We Can Support You
- Address your questions about trauma informed approaches and COVID-19 responses. Seriously, ask us any questions. How do I talk to my kids about this? How do I connect with my 80-year-old aunt in a different state? How do I monitor my staff’s coping remotely? How do I communicate to staff in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them?
- Track down resources. Do you need a TIP sheet or have ideas about something specific? Let us know and we will work on it. I need a script for telling staff about the change in command. I need a tip sheet to give teachers on how and why they need to be in touch with students. I need a tip sheet on safe technology to connect youth. I need messaging in Spanish.
- Highlight the TI work you are doing. Do you have something good you’d like to share? Rural strategies? School-based strategies? Peer support? If something is working, let us know and we can share with others. It is an active learning experience!
Send questions and thoughts to info@traumainformedoregon.org. If we don’t have the answer we will find it or let you know.
What We’re Working On
- Updating the TIO homepage regularly. This will include strategies, things to think about, and sector specific ideas for Trauma-Informed COVID-19 responses.
- “Virtual office hours” – Mondays 3:30-4:30 p.m. and Thursdays 8:30 a.m.-9:30 a.m. starting March 23, 2020. TIO staff will be here to field questions, think through situations, and promote connection and support. Jump in anytime for as long as needed. We’ll try it out for a few weeks and see how it goes. See our Community Incident Response page for the Zoom link. If you aren’t up for Zooming and you need time to talk through a situation at your organization, system, or community, please email us at info@traumainformedoregon.org and we can set that up.
- FAQs regarding TIC and COVID-19 will be collected and made available. We will update resources but want to help with the application of all of this as well.
- Creating Considerations for a Trauma Informed Response for Work Settings. We’re also providing strategies to help implement responses to COVID-19, please include any you have.
Hi everyone. I am Mandy Davis from Trauma Informed Oregon and I really just wanted to take a moment to connect and say hello to everyone out there. I hope we’re going to find lots of ways to connect because we’re definitely going to need it during this time. I also wanted to take a moment to let you know what Trauma Informed Oregon is doing at this time. Specifically, regarding the response to COVID-19 and the coronavirus. Trauma Informed Oregon is housed at Portland State University’s School of Social Work and we’re mostly funded by the Oregon Health Authority to help systems and organizations across Oregon implement the principles and practices of trauma informed care.
Quickly, if you’ve signed up, if you’re already signed up on our collaborative, you’re going to get the information I’m going to talk about right now also in an email. I apologize for that duplication, but in this time, and and kind of living to our principles of trauma informed care and practice, we want to offer information in multiple methods of modalities. So, first of all, please know that Trauma Informed Oregon is open. Our staff are working. Just not in our office spaces like many of you. We are focused very much on bringing in the principles and the practices of trauma informed care as we respond to COVID-19.
As we hear often right now, are things like “this is uncharted territory”, “this might be a new normal”. However, I want to remind us that the principles, the knowledge, and the practice of trauma informed care can help us in our efforts to reduce the impact of acute stress, to prevent unnecessary trauma inducing policies, to mitigate and respond to long-term impacts of toxic stress, and to prepare us for the healing and the repair that’s going to need to happen as this evolves. We do this work centering diversity, equity, inclusion. Knowing that though we are all experiencing this, we also know that the impact and the needs are going to be different across communities.
You can read more below about the different things Trauma Informed Oregon is doing at this time. But a few highlights to just call your attention to. One, we want to hear your questions, your concerns, your needs. And we will get that information to you as quickly as possible, as well as making kind of a databank of those questions and those responses because we’re all in a learning process here. So, are you wanting to know how maybe to do a trauma informed debrief remotely? Or is this policy kind of how to develop a new policy around communication that is considering trauma informed care. How to build resilience in the work that we’re doing right now while also reducing toxic stress. Any of those things, let us know. If you need a tip sheet on how families come back into services after they’ve been gone? Again, do that thinking now and let us get working on those things as we can.
Number two, we’re going to hold office hours and we’ll even start tomorrow, 8:30 to 10:00 AM every Thursday and 3:30 to 5:00 PM every Monday, we will have an open zoom link where you can pop on and ask questions, share strategies you’re using around this, if you have a policy you’re working on, have questions about that, or you just want to share a cup of tea and say hi and be connected. We’ll continue to provide that for as long as it feels helpful and useful. There’s also a document linked below called “Considerations for a Trauma Informed Response for Work Settings”. And we’ve put this together, I encourage you to download it to look at it. Our hope with this is that it will provide a framework, an understanding of why we’re applying the trauma informed care principles and why they’re so important right now. And it’ll give you some ideas to think about. And again, hopefully, a way to think about this with all of the multiple decisions that are going to be happening over time. With that we’ll also… you’ll see a link to a strategy list. So, the considerations as kind of larger order thinking about what you should be… what we want to be thinking about as we make decisions. And the strategy list will be actual examples of how people have put this into play.
So, we will be calling on you to give us your strategies as well. The resources we will keep up to date. And then also this particular page where we’ll be kind of updating conversations, blogs, resources, information, so that you hopefully have an easy way to get into the information. So, on that note, I just wanted to share some of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately that have been on my mind lately. And there are couple of kind of… kind of a couple areas. So, I’m focused on how we can support our leaders to best support staff and communities during this time. I’m focused on how to support those for whom there is no house or home, or for those for whom home is not safe. I’m also focused on how we can think about the immediate needs we’re having, the acute stress that’s happening, but also the long-term impacts.
So, what can we provide? What is going to be needed and can provide in a month or two months or six months, and as this kind of unfolds and those impacts are there. And I’m also very much focused on how we can maintain social connection during a time of physical distancing, because we know that social connection is a significant buffer to toxic stress. More than anything, I’m focused on how Trauma Informed Oregon can be supportive to you. So please stay connected. Let us know what might be helpful. If there’s something different about any of this that you need, please let us know. So, we look forward to being in touch.