My grant proposal will be targeting children living in Gainesville. It will be putting therapists in all of the schools in Gainesville to help decrease the amount of ACEs they experience and decrease the negative effects from ACEs. They will meet with all the children once a week and more if the child needs it. They will help educate the children about ACEs and teach them healthy coping mechanisms and how to deal with trauma they have experienced.
Our grant will use many different trauma informed principles. One of them is safety.(SAMHSA 2014) Safety is very important especially when working with people who have experienced trauma. We need to make sure that the children feel safe. This is one of the main reasons we are putting therapists in the schools so the children have a safe person to talk to and go to for help. The therapists will have safe activities for them do to and healthy ways for them to cope with the stress, anxiety, and depression they are feeling. These safe activities will be taught to the kids when they visit the therapist and be ways for the therapist to help them heal from their past traumas. The safe activities will be healthy safe ways for the children to cope. So instead of turning to drugs and alcohol the kids can learn to journal, paint, play with clay or other objects. Another one we will utilize is empowerment, voice, and choice. These are all very important principles especially when working with individuals who have experienced trauma. Especially young children who have experienced trauma they often lost their voice and choice and their sense of control and empowerment was taken away. These are very damaging to a little kid and from seeing the therapist we are hoping to bring these back to the kids. The therapists will be able from meeting with the kids know what they need individually and help them recover and empower them. They will all be trained in trauma informed care so they will know how to be able to help the kids get their voice and choice back in their lives and empower them. We will also utilize peer support and mutual self-help when appropriate. If the kids feel comfortable with sharing their experiences and being open we can have kids who have experienced or are experiencing similar things work through it together and do activities and coping skills together. We can also have other staff or adults who have gone through similar things come and work with those kids to help them and give them the peer support they need to help them heal and recover.
The main levels of the CDC’s Social Ecological Model we will be working with in our project are individual and relationship.(CDC 2021) We will be working in the individual level because we will be helping build the participants knowledge, attitude, skills, and beliefs within themselves. The therapists will be educating the children so they know what should and should not be happening to them. We will also build their knowledge about healthy coping strategies and ways to deal with the adversity in their lives. We will build their self-efficacy in themselves and help them be empowered and confident in themselves and their lives. We will also change their attitudes and beliefs about what is not okay for them to be experiencing and what they need to speak up about and make sure it stops and they get the help that they need. We will also be working with the relationship level helping them build safe relationships. The main reason we will be having the therapists be in the schools is for there to be a safe adult and person for them to have a relationship with, feel safe with, and be able to confide in and talk to. By building this relationship with the kids it will help prevent a lot of the adverse effects that ACEs can have on young children and help prevent ACEs from happening in the future. Focusing on these two levels and incorporating them into our program will greatly help the kids and our program be successful.
We will use a public health framework to better our intervention and success of our program. We will take into account all aspects such as mental health, health care, child welfare, early childhood, education, welfare, housing, justice, and corrections. By looking at all of these different aspects of the framework we will be a le to take into account all of them and make sure we are not leaving anything out when we are helping these children with trauma and ACEs. We will also be using primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention in our program. We will be using a primary prevention approach because the therapists will be meeting with and talking to every single one of the children in the elementary schools. The therapist will be regularly meeting with all of the children every other week and teaching them similar to Miss Kendra’s list about what should and should not be happening to them and what is not okay. By doing this it will be preventing ACEs from happening in the first place and be primary prevention. We will be using secondary prevention because we will have the kids fill out surveys so we will know what kids have experienced ACEs and what kids have not. By detecting trauma in these kids’ lives early we will be able to quickly reverse the damage it has caused and help the kids right away. Tertiary prevention will also be used because those kids who have experienced many ACEs and need help will be able to meet with the therapists as much as they need to help them cope and heal from it.(CDC Prevention)
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