October 6, 2021 | Volume 2, Number 5

Compassionate, Trauma-Conscious Leadership

Featured Article Compassionate Leadership: Caring for Yourself and Others in Times of Crisis News You Can Use Cultivating Compassionate School Communities that Respond to Trauma Effectively Project AWARE: Bringing Mental Health Literacy to Pre-K-12 Students Featured C-TLC Fellow: Stacy Bachelder-Giles Learn more Events, Resources and Program Updates What's happening this month Access C-TLC Resources Healthcare workers & Educators Addressing and Reducing Trauma (HEART) Collective Learn more about the Childhood-Trauma Learning Collaborative Become a C-TLC Member Membership is open to individual educators, schools, agencies, community-based organizations, and nonprofit educational institutions in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.  Editor's Corner Martha Staeheli, PhD, C-TLC Director We are now a couple of months into the new school year and Year 4 of the Childhood-Trauma Learning Collaborative. We are all settling into routines and schedules and distilling the outcomes of our recent work. As a learning collaborative of practice, the C-TLC's yearly activities featured: In Year 1, a concentration on knowledge dissemination and community building. In Year 2, a deep dive into training and technical assistance focusing on school culture assessment. In Year 3, opportunities to address the emerging needs of school mental health in a pandemic, with virtual trainings, wellness events, Compassionate Conversations in Schools, and our HEART Collective work to build collaborations between schools and community healthcare centers.  In Year 4 of the C-TLC, we are focused on connection: expanding our work through resource dissemination, amplifying local capacity, and creating connected communities. In this issue, we offer several strategies and updates for you to think about connection in your work, from increasing mental health literacy in school communities to supporting Project AWARE grantees, and embodying compassionate leadership principles. We are excited to begin this year with you offering programming to help you connect to yourselves and your colleagues, students, and everyone with whom you engage to create more compassionate school communities focused on mental well-being.

Featured Article: Compassionate Leadership: Caring for Yourself and Others in Times of Crisis By Martha Staeheli, C-TLC Director, Instructor, Yale Department of Psychiatry Leaders often have to balance multiple and competing needs in their “teams” and organizations, including increased workloads, vicarious trauma among staff, student and family needs, and scarce resources. Characteristics that make leaders good at their jobs—compassion, perfectionism, toughness, practicality, and integrity—can also make them more susceptible to feeling like they can’t do enough, ignoring their own needs, feeling powerless, and making it harder to ask for help when they need it. School and mental health leaders face an even more significant challenge: caring for themselves while maintaining compassion and attunement to the strain on their staff, students, or clients. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased our exposure to toxic stress, trauma, exhaustion, and burnout. That is particularly true for people in caregiving roles, like school mental health providers and educators. So, how can leaders address the needs in their workplaces and guide teams to success? Read more

News You Can Use

Cultivating Compassionate School Communities that Respond to Trauma Effectively By Dana Asby, CEI Director of Innovation & Research Support, New England MHTTC Education Coordinator Teachers and administrators come to schools with various educational backgrounds and life experiences that influence their abilities to support students’ academic and emotional well-being effectively. Peer learning can be a powerful way for school staff to grow from hearing each other’s successes and challenges. Offering these opportunities regularly, and pairing them with intentional professional development training, can provide school staff with a cohesive set of strategies, tools, and practices to create a school community that works together to reduce and respond compassionately to trauma. New England Mental Health Technology Transfer Center’s (MHTTC) Childhood-Trauma Learning Collaborative (C-TLC) developed a free, online training course to guide state educational agencies, school districts, and schools through this complex process. We took the key lessons we taught our C-TLC Fellows over these past three years and developed a course that allows any school professional to gain the tools they need to implement transformational change in their learning space.  Read more Project AWARE: Bringing Mental Health Literacy to Pre-K-12 Schools By Dana Asby, CEI Director of Innovation & Research Support, New England MHTTC Education Coordinator Compassionate leadership in education comes from many levels: the teacher who pauses the day’s lesson to check in on a student who has fallen asleep, the principal who connects an unhoused family to needed resources, the superintendent who ensures there is funding set aside for school mental health providers, the state education administrator who finds opportunities to bring more mental health programming into their districts. With SAMHSA’s Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education) initiative, we see an example of compassionate leadership coming from one of our federal agencies. SAMHSA has set aside funding to help schools and districts coordinate at the state level to provide mental health literacy training to staff and students. This helps fill gaps in mental health care left by the overwhelming need for services—especially since COVID-19 exponentially increased mental health crises—partnered with the lack of qualified staff to address these pressing needs. SAMHSA heard schools’ pleas to bring more expertise around youth mental health into the hands of educators and delivered a project that does just that!  Read more

Featured Fellow: Stacy Bachelder-Giles, Principal at Broad Street Elementary School, Supports the Whole Child Through Compassionate Leadership By Hailey Jordan, Research Assistant, New England MHTTC Supporting the whole child to improve physical, social, and emotional well-being is not new to Stacy Bachelder-Giles. As an elementary school principal in the C-TLC Fellowship program, Stacy has brought more attention to the importance of being trauma-informed to her district. She has also grown into a living example of what it means to be a compassionate leader for her staff, students, and families.  Stacy's main priority each day is to keep teachers and children safe, while ensuring they feel supported. You can find her visiting different classrooms and checking in with staff to make sure they have the needed resources to support the whole child. On days of the month ending in zero, Stacy is wearing a cape and riding a scooter throughout the school disguised as 'Zero the Hero.' Her office is also a safer space where students can read to her and visit Monty, the new therapy dog. As principal of a growth mindset school, she works with teachers to host growth mindset assemblies and give students trait cards to recognize outstanding efforts toward growth mindset—students can collect trait cards during the school year to help remind them of their strengths.

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Resources & Upcoming Events Access and share C-TLC resources: The C-TLC develops training materials to enhance school culture and prepare professionals in education and mental health to improve and support the mental health and resiliency of school-aged youth. Choose a learning track in the C-TLC's Training Library and begin your journey toward compassionate school mental health practices. Click here to view a topical directory of all our learning resources. Schools This Year: Supporting Student and Staff Mental Health Whether you are returning to school in-person, virtually, or in a hybrid format, apply a trauma-informed, equitable, and compassionate lens to providing mental health supports to every member of the school community. Because we will all return to school as different people than when we left, our suite of resources is designed to help school staff understand the need for and nature of becoming more trauma-sensitive and considerations for working with trauma-impacted communities. Classroom WISE: Well-Being Information and Strategies for Educators Classroom WISE is a FREE three-part training package that assists K-12 educators in supporting the mental health of students in the classroom. This package offers evidence-based strategies and skills to engage and support students with mental health concerns in the classroom. In addition to a free online course on mental health literacy for educators and school personnel, a video library and resource collection are also available! Learn more. C-TLC HealtheKnowledge Course Now Available: Access our new online training course, Cultivating Compassionate School Communities that Respond to Trauma Effectively to learn how to: cultivate a compassionate school community that will buffer against the negative effects of trauma, build resilience for all students, and provide stress-relief and enhanced well-being for teachers and other school personnel as well as students. Gain understanding of how a compassionate school mental health support system can help schools create systems, policies, and protocols to prevent, address, and recover from tragedies and crises including staff or student suicide, school violence, natural disasters, and global pandemics.

Register now for our virtual events!

Cultivating Compassionate School Communities Online Course Information Session Date/Time: Thu., 10/14 @ 10 a.m. EDT Join us for this review of the C-TLC's newest resource, an online course to guide schools towards becoming trauma-skilled, called Cultivating Compassionate School Communities that Respond to Trauma Effectively. Register now

Explore the ways you can take advantage of the C-TLC's training and technical assistance resources and events, if you miss a live event: Visit the New England MHTTC's online Products and Resources Catalog Access Our Virtual Training Library Review Our Training Archive on YouTube Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Stay posted to our Events page for updates and announcements.

Our HEART Learning Community is open to a national audience! Make plans to engage in webinars and peer learning opportunities that fit your schedule. Monthly HEART Learning Community sessions will begin in January 2022! This regional effort is an initiative with: SAMHSA Region 1 Office Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) Office of Regional Operations (Region 1) New England Addiction Technology Transfer Center New England Prevention Technology Transfer Center

Know a middle or high school student in New England who is passionate about mental health? We're recruiting for our HEART Student Advisory Board. Applications or videos due by October 31.

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.” ~ Brené Brown As always, we are aware of what a privilege it is to connect to this compassionate and hard-working group of educators, behavioral health providers, and school mental health staff. We hope you will take the time and space to connect to yourselves first. That powerful connection provides fertile ground for trust, respect, kindness, and affection we can offer to our communities.   Take care of yourselves and each other

The C-TLC is funded by the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and is part of the New England Mental Health Technology Transfer Center (New England MHTTC) Network.

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