- Next, in our look ahead, the roll-out of a specific kind
of care for a specially-affected population.
Wisconsin First Lady Tonette Walker spoke about it
at last week's State of the State address.
- We call our initiative Fostering Futures.
Fostering Futures is about creating hope by advancing
principles of trauma-informed care across Wisconsin.
Let me give you an example.
If a child is belligerent and angry as he meets with his child
welfare worker, we used to say, "What's wrong with that child?"
But with trauma-informed care, we teach people to ask the
question, "What happened to that young person?"
Instead of labeling the child as good or bad, this approach moves
us to better understand what could be causing the behavior.
Just so we're clear, we know there still have to be
consequences for their actions, but shifting to trauma-informed
perspective gives us access to more tools for success
and better outcomes.
[applause]
- First Lady Tonette Walker is on the steering committee of
Fostering Futures, as is Elizabeth Hudson,
a licensed clinical social worker
with the Wisconsin office of Children's Mental Health.
Elizabeth, thanks very much for being here.
- Oh, thank you so much. It's a great opportunity.
- First just very briefly, what is trauma-informed care?
- It's a good question and it's a big concept and it's very hard
to sort of distill it down.
But simply put,
it is a principle-based culture change process.
Many people have a sense that it is an intervention or a therapy,
but actually it's giving people information about what happens
after exposure to stress that is toxic in our bodies and then
with that knowledge how do we need to change how we are in
relationships, whether it's service relationships
or community connections, et cetera.
- So how do you change?
I mean, what is the thing that you do with trauma-informed care
that's different from what the people who have experienced this
stress or this adversity might have found before?
- Right.
So I loved that Mrs. Walker used that phrase "it's not really
what is wrong with you; it's what's happened to you." So
before, we would probably be -- and I was part of this system
of, you know, being a professional therapist -- have a
label to identify a belligerent child with.
And it might be a label like oppositional defiance disorder
or reactive attachment disorder.
And instead of being very proscriptive and medicalizing
situations, with trauma-informed care we take a more,
I would say compassionate look, a less clinical look
at behaviors to say, "Why does this behavior make sense?
Why would a child who is being interactive with someone
like a child welfare worker have a very negative reaction?"
- Does the sheer acknowledgment of that on the part of people
like yourself help these people behave differently?
- Well, it's been one of the sort of great advances in having
people with lived experience lead this movement in many ways,
because those folks who have experienced early trauma or
early adversity know how that's impacted them, but they've never
had the ability to share that as part of their medical history or
as part of why they become involved in child welfare, other
areas.
So this has allowed them to give voice to what has happened and
then we are now better able to figure out how to be effective.
- So this is a statewide initiative, and the First Lady
talked about county workers being trained up and state
workers.
Are there other states across the country approaching this as
a statewide initiative?
- That's the key phrase, a statewide.
There are states that are doing pockets of activity and have
been.
I'd say it's been very popularized within the past four
years, but it's taken quite a bit of time for it to become
generally acknowledged.
And in Wisconsin, because we had for four or five years a really
wonderful grassroots movement, we now have the partnership with
leadership in state government and infrastructure that has such
power to create social change now adopting this as something
that they want to do.
And that is very unique in the nation.
And we're being recognized as such.
- Well, more reporting to do on this.
Elizabeth Hudson, thanks very much.
- Thank you.