Risking Connection Trauma Training: A Pathway Toward Trauma-Informed Care in Child Congregate Care Settings

Despite the high prevalence of traumatic experiences and attachment disruptions among clients in child congregate care treatment settings, until recently there has been little formal training on trauma for staff serving this population. Staff trauma training is one important intervention for agencies aiming to implement trauma-informed care (TIC), a term describing an international trend in mental health care whereby treatment approaches and cultures recognize the pervasive impact of trauma and aim to ameliorate, rather than exacerbate, the effects of trauma. The current study examines the impact of the curriculum-based Risking Connection (RC) trauma training on the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors of 261 staff trainees in 12 trainee groups at five child congregate care agencies. RC is one of several models used nationally and internationally as a pathway toward TIC culture change in human service organizations including residential treatment. For a subset of agencies, measures were collected at four different time points. Results showed an increase in knowledge about the core concepts of the RC training consistently across groups, an increase in beliefs favorable to TIC over time, and an increase in self-reported staff behavior favorable to TIC in the milieu. In addition, these findings suggest that the train-the-trainer (TTT) model of dissemination central to RC is effective at increasing beliefs favorable to TIC. Differences in posttraining changes between three agencies are qualitatively investigated and discussed as examples of the importance of organization-level factors in successful implementation of agency-wide interventions like RC. Implications for implementing RC and trauma-informed agency change are discussed.