The UCLA-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress (NCCTS) provides leadership, organizational structure, and coordination to the current grantees, Affiliates, and partners of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN). Working closely with the NCTSN's  funding agency—the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)—the NCCTS leads the NCTSN in its efforts to raise the standard of care and improve access to services for traumatized children, their families and communities throughout the United States.   

The NCCTS guides major collaborative initiatives that help meet the NCTSN mission and are consistent and aligned with the vision and mission of the NCCTS.

NCCTS Vision: Advancing the field of child trauma by fostering and sustaining NCTSN collaborations to accomplish together what no one NCTSN member, partner, or community can achieve alone.

NCCTS Mission: As the organizational backbone of the NCTSN, the NCCTS builds relationships; collaborates to transform NCTSN experience and expertise into resources, interventions, and trainings to disseminate nationally; and measures and conveys the NCTSNs value and progress in addressing child trauma for children, families, and communities. 

The NCCTS brings NCTSN experts and partners together around dozens of major initiatives to: 

• Increase awareness of child trauma, its impact, and treatments that can help
• Develop trainings on child trauma that are informed by implementation and learning science
• Enhance awareness and use of Evidence-based Practice as an approach to child trauma care as well as Evidence-based Treatments and other effective clinical and service intervention approaches 
• Engage in evaluation and data collection 
• Increase the number of child-serving professionals, organizations and systems that are trauma-informed through development and spread of trauma-informed organizational assessment tools, interventions, and new implementation and sustainability models
• Foster community among  and provide technical assistance to widely diverse sites, from those led by national experts in the field to community agencies just beginning to develop child trauma programs
• Maintain previously funded NCTSN sites and individuals as part of the Affiliate program
• Engage family and young adult partners at all levels of the NCTSN, including as leaders of NCTSN collaborative groups and members of the NCTSN Steering Committee and NCTSN Advisory Board, defining a unique model of partnership for the child trauma field
• Produce hundreds of trusted resources  for audiences including parents and caregivers, child-serving providers, educators and school staff, first responders, and more
• Respond to national emergencies and major events that have a potentially traumatic impact on children and families (pandemic, natural disasters, school shootings), training and mobilizing NCTSN members to respond locally and regionally
• Focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in all efforts across the NCTSN

For questions (including media inquiries) or for more information about the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, contact info@nctsn.org.

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