The University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions partnered with Peace4Tarpon under the Robert Wood Johnson Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) grant. Together they created 2 online graduate courses that focus on addressing ACEs and creating trauma-informed and resilience-based programs from a public health approach. Peace4Gainesville and Peace4 TheBigBend have also contributed to these courses. 

This post is intended to showcase some of the work of the graduate students in the Spring 2020 course “PHC6534: Trauma-Informed Approaches for Individuals, Communities, and Public Health.” This is the second time we have taught this course.  

The goal of this course is to provide students with an overview of ACEs and resilience science and the trauma-informed approach within a public health framework; an examination of the public health prevention and treatment of trauma at the primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention levels; the opportunity to design and implement public health interventions to address and prevent trauma and ACEs at all levels of the social ecological model; and practical instruction in the grant writing process. Upon successful implementation of instruction, students will be able to see public health problems and solutions through a trauma-informed lens.

The 38 graduate students enrolled in this semester's course will be posting a summary of their grant proposals which will include our course title: PHC6534 and the title of their proposal. Some have already posted and the rest will post by this evening. 

Their grants involved selecting a specific target population and area of ACEs/ trauma that could be addressed through a public health intervention. The students designed a trauma-informed, resilience-based public health intervention that seeks to improve health, address a problem, and/ or build resilience within the population and selected ACEs/ trauma area. The students selected one or more levels of the social ecological model that the intervention will address, utilized academic/ research literature as justification for each of their decisions at all phases, and wrote the assignment as if they were responding to a grant funding announcement. They were required to include the trauma-informed principles that their proposal intends to utilize, a description of their public health framework, and a plan to evaluate progress toward their outcomes.

Please feel free to comment on the student projects if you would like to provide feedback!

The course syllabus is attached.

Thank you!

Lindsey King, PhD, MPH, CHES, CCRP, CTTS
Clinical Assistant Professor

College of Public Health and Health Professions
University of Florida
Email: Linking@ufl.edu