Current and Affiliated NCTSN Organizational Members

The Arkansas Network for Early Stress and Trauma (NEST) will: 1) provide culturally competent, client-centered, family-focused, evidence-based assessment and treatment—including Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) and Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP)—to 340 traumatized children aged 0–5 referred by child welfare professionals, early childhood educators, military partners and/or child advocates; 2) train, coach, and monitor fidelity in at least 70 mental health professionals to implement evidence-based interventions targeting young children; and 3) develop training materials, resource kits, and other tools to enhance trauma-informed practices for children aged 0–5 in court, child welfare, child advocacy, early childhood education, veteran, and military systems.

The Early Trauma Treatment Network (ETTN): Raising the Standard of Care for Young Children 0–5 will address the needs of traumatized young children and preschoolers by raising their standard of care and by enabling increased access to evidence-based trauma treatment for them. ETTN will work to build early trauma competence in the systems serving these children. Statistically, young children and preschoolers have a higher exposure to trauma; and they are the most defenseless due to developmental vulnerability, and dependency on parents and/or caregivers. ETTN will: 1) address training and service gaps by engaging in activities that promote workforce development; 2) create culturally competent products, resources, and training protocols; and 3) build mechanisms for collaboration across the mental health, pediatric care, early childhood education, early intervention, child welfare, judicial, and military systems. ETTN is a collaborative of four national programs. All ETTN sites will provide training in Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), a manualized, evidence-based intervention for young children. To improve access to services and to raise the standard of care for traumatized young children and preschoolers, ETTN will build training infrastructure and conduct five Learning Collaboratives with NCTSN Centers and community-based programs—focusing on American Indian providers, military family providers, distance learning technologies, Train-the-Trainer Learning Collaboratives to increase CPP capacity in training and supervision, and national Learning Collaboratives with tracks for Spanish-speaking providers. Additionally, ETTN will create educational and training materials for parents, childcare providers, and service providers for military families; and will collaborate with the NCCTS and with NCTSN Centers in cross-site evaluation, training, and dissemination. Over the course of the grant, ETTN will provide training related to early childhood trauma to 40,000+ service providers and CPP training to a minimum of 480 mental health practitioners.

The Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice (CTRJJ) will bring together national leaders in the child traumatic stress field to develop and widely disseminate evidence-based trauma interventions and trauma-informed services for youth and families exposed to domestic and community violence who are involved in the court, juvenile justice, and law enforcement systems. Three evidence-based interventions will be disseminated to ten sites each and tested for sustainability in three parallel initiatives by model developers: Trauma Affect Regulation: Guide for Education and Therapy-Adolescents (TARGET-A), and Trauma and Grief Components Therapy-Adolescents (TGCT-A), which are the two most widely disseminated evidence-based trauma interventions for violence-exposed youth in juvenile justice; and Families OverComing Under Stress (FOCUS), an evidence-based trauma intervention for violence-exposed families. Additionally, two other Network-developed juvenile justice trauma-informed services curricula/tools—Think Trauma and Judges’ Benchcard—will be adapted and disseminated across court, juvenile justice, and law enforcement systems in ten sites. Network-developed fact sheets, webinars, and professional/public policy publications will be updated and extended to address key underserved, violence-exposed, justice-involved youth (including those who are involved in gangs, sex trafficking victims, sex offenders, and substance abusers) and youth of color. These initiatives will involve 50 Community Treatment and Services (CTS) Centers or non-Network sites with 300 service agencies in training 5,000 multidisciplinary justice-affiliated child service providers in at least 15 states.

The Child and Adolescent Trauma Treatment and Training Institute (CATTTI) will provide trauma-informed training to the child welfare system and will implement trauma-informed, evidence-based practices into community-based care throughout Kentucky, with an emphasis on an under-resourced region of the state that includes a large number of military children associated with Fort Knox and Fort Campbell. CATTTI will select and train 16 clinical associates to deliver Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), using a Learning Collaborative model of training, in consultation with NCTSN Category II professionals who are expert in creating military adaptations to these evidence-based practices. Evidence-based treatment services will be provided to 1,020 children and caregivers across the state. Training will be provided to 480 child welfare workers using the NCTSN Child Welfare Trauma Training Toolkit.