Commitment to Trauma Informed Care Creates Transformation in Brown County

2023 marks 15 years that Wellpoint Care Network has been at the forefront of the Trauma Informed Care (TIC) movement.

During that time, more than 75,000 people have learned about our approach and the Seven Essential Ingredients (7ei). Additionally, more than 750 individuals have taken our ‘Train the Trainer’ course, ensuring that these cutting-edge concepts are being shared with others.

In Brown County, two of those trainers are Tana Koss and Heather McGriff from Family Services of Northeast Wisconsin. Family Services is a non-profit, human services agency that offers programs that support children, teens and adults during challenges and transitions in their lives.

“Years ago, we committed to being a Trauma Informed Care agency,” said Koss. “We knew it was going to be a journey, not a destination. We had some programs that were well supported and resourced in becoming trauma informed and we wanted to translate that to all our programs. We knew we wanted our president, our business office and program staff to all get the proper material. We tried pulling a committee together ourselves, but quickly realized that was going to be a big task. Then, Brown County United Way exposed us to the work of your organization, and it was a good fit right away in terms of Wellpoint Care’s spread of programming, from community-based to clinical. We’ve stuck with it because it’s vetted, it gets updated and we have the resource of experts, which has felt supportive. When we ask people what they’re looking for, they want to know how to apply the theories and the philosophy. Wellpoint Care’s model is really strong in that way, in that staff leave feeling like they have a toolbox of what to do now.”

Koss and McGriff were first trained in 2016 and have been recertified three times. To date, they’ve led more than 25 trainings, which include staff within the Family Services organization, as well as members of the community.

“One of the things that it’s really helped us with is being able to have a language we can all work from, and also to have that factual backing to a lot of the things that we’ve known for a very long time,” said McGriff. “That’s really helped us create a space where we can have conversations with clients, all the way up to our teams and leadership, as well as places in the community.”

That shared language can also help with interaction with law enforcement.

“Recently, there was this incident with this young man who has autism,” added McGriff. “He walked off property from our program, and it was so nice to see these officers be so patient with him. There were four police cars there, they all showed up. They were talking him through what they were doing. They adjusted his handcuffs. They even said, ‘We can take them off if you’re not struggling with us,’ and gave him so many options. Then there was a trained officer that had more knowledge about mental health and we’re seeing more of that in our community, which is just so relieving. I complimented him about how great it was to see that, because there are times when it goes a completely different direction.”

They plan to continue training Trauma Informed Care as often as they can. 

“My first exposure to this material definitely came with hope, in terms of what to do about it at the individual level, at the agency level, community level,” said Koss. “As a trainer, in the beginning, I was so certain that most of the room was going to have this incredible ‘aha’ moment, where things were coming together for them and making sense. And then, 15 trainings in, I would have to talk to Heather and say, ‘Do people really not know this already? Are we just making them go through something they know already?’ But, inevitably, there’s at least a cohort of the group that have literally never heard of any of this before. That’s what motivates me to keep going. The fact that it’s new material, even 15 years in, to some is what motivates me to keep going. We’ve seen impact at the agency level, facilities, programs, client care. I think there’s some internal motivation that we have to be a part of the community movement more.”

Koss and McGriff highly recommend Trauma Informed Care training because they’ve seen first-hand the changes it can have within an organization.

“We had a very agile young man who used to go up on our roof when he was upset,” said McGriff. “The staff kept getting into that power struggle with him, coming from that more traditional perspective. Finally, when we were able to shift into, ‘What is it about the roof that he likes so much?,’ we were able to ask some different questions. And, he said, ‘Well, I really just like the wind in my hair and I like being able to see a long distance and I don’t feel claustrophobic up there.’ That creates some different things that we can do to help him. So, we gave him a fan in his room and then the plan was for him to go in there when he got upset, and he would sit and rock with the fan. Then he would be ready to go back to programming as soon as he was able to feel some of the wind. There have been hundreds of specific examples like that, which are really cool to see. A lot of the time, our staff would feel like they hit a dead end. Since training a lot of the staff to have that perspective shift, it creates so much more patience from the staff’s perspective and such better care for the clients. So, it really is a two-fold improvement. The staff are less stressed about having to interact with these kids that are challenging at times, and the kids feel like they’re in such a more supportive environment. After tracking physical interventions and police contacts since the application of trauma informed strategies, the residential program has experienced a significant drop in these incidents.”

Those changes can also have a positive impact when it comes to staff retention and happiness.

“At the organizational level, I think most of the impact falls within our human resources department,” said Koss. “In the day-to-day type decisions, for instance if we have a mandatory training, the message might still be delivered that it’s mandatory, but there’s an opt out option depending on the content of the material. I don’t think that would have happened pre-trauma informed care lens. Then some really large examples, like last year we rolled out a sabbatical benefit. That starts at three years and progressively gets to be more and more of a benefit at five years and every five years after. It’s not just offering the sabbatical benefit, but it’s just shy of requiring it and requiring that it’s taken all at once and treated as if you literally can’t log in at all. We put a lot of thought into how we wanted it to look when someone was on sabbatical. Making it mandatory so there wasn’t guilt and people would do it. That’s all about caregiver capacity and it was discussions around capacity buildings that led to that implementation.”

“Additionally, we’ve made a lot of enhancements within our building and a lot of it is so simple,” added Koss. “Every opportunity we’ve had to increase daylight in the space that our staff live in, or clients go to. We didn’t necessarily need Trauma Informed Care to do that, but I think the more significant drive to get it done whenever the opportunity strikes came from this permeation of how we do what we do.”

They admit that there is often some hesitation when first introducing these practices, but it’s worth it in the end.

“From that old traditional viewpoint, if there’s an adolescent that’s not complying to what you’re asking them to do and we are giving them something, like a fidget or music or some kind of ball to bounce on, they’re going to be like, ‘Why are you giving them something? You’re rewarding them,’” said McGriff. “So, there was a lot of conversations about what the goal is in that interaction. We really went back constantly to that regulation piece. We have to get regulation first. The staff were able to eventually adjust to that perspective, and now it’s kind of like mantra. Let’s get them regulated and then we’ll figure out on the tail end the consequences. There’s also that idea with staff that if you are giving them things in that moment, that they’re not in control anymore. So, helping staff recognize where they have control and where they need to give and take a little bit. That can be scary for staff. If they have somebody who is acting out or being violent and they have to kind of figure out where their level of safety is. I think on a program level, you’re constantly having those conversations and it does require a lot of day-to-day discussions to get people to that point.”

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