It is that time of year again. Spring has sprung! After the long months of gazing out the window at dull surroundings, dealing with cold temperatures, and sunsetting before our workday ends, we are finally into a bright and glorious season. Spring is upon us, and now we get to look forward to longer days, warmer weather, and everything around us coming back to life.
This fresh new beginning can be the perfect opportunity for professional growth as well. As human services professionals, we’re always challenged with finding new ways to support the populations we serve, as well as to support our personal growth in areas. These opportunities for growth extend throughout entire agencies as well. At Benchmarks, we assist agencies with discovering new beginnings and opportunities to grow through specialized training and implementation work.
For County DSS offices that partner with Benchmarks, implementation work requires them to dig deep to cultivate change within their agency. Many agencies across the state are interested in digging deeper into their core values and mission, planting seeds for growth and opportunity for their social workers and supervisory staff. By implementing new programs and processes to promote trauma-informed practices, County DSS offices commit themselves to the necessary work of extending their roots. This includes planting seeds of change that begin with social workers’ daily interactions in which they respond in a trauma-informed manner. Leadership promotes the same trauma-informed changes that better the lives of children and families by utilizing compassionate trauma lenses when working with their staff daily. In much the same way that growing a thriving garden requires hard hands-on work and the right combination of water, sun, and soil conditions, implementing cultural change within an agency takes the right combination of time, dedication, willingness to learn, communication, and flexibility from everyone at the agency.
To promote positive process changes that keep children and families’ well-being in mind, these changes must be rooted deep within the agency in order foster sustainable growth throughout the agency. Deepening these trauma-informed roots are necessary to support agency wide culture change. Some of the implementation processes that Benchmarks has assisted agencies with include universal trauma screenings, standardized clinical assessments for children, as well as agency and community wide trainings focused specifically on trauma and creating a trauma-informed child welfare agency and community. Putting these processes into practice helps staff shift their mindsets and view children and families with a more trauma-informed lens.
Find some time this spring to ponder on where you can plant seeds for change, finding opportunities to grow and blossom as an individual, as a professional, and as an agency. Benchmarks is available to help you and your agency to develop through a myriad of projects and training opportunities! These opportunities can be found on our website at: www.benchmarksnc.org/training-catalog.
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