Projects & Impact

AHP was a subcontractor to SAMHSA’s National Center for Trauma-Informed Care and Alternatives to Restraint and Seclusion (NCTIC) for 8 years. A diverse team of staff and consultants, many of them trauma survivors and nationally recognized leaders, provided technical assistance (TA) and participated in developing products and materials under this contract. The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD) was the prime contractor for NCTIC.

NCTIC supported SAMHSA’s commitment to provide information, technical assistance, and support to increase awareness about the impact of trauma on people with mental health or substance use disorders, as well as people served by public health, education, and corrections systems.

A key focus of the work was to promote alternatives to seclusion, restraint, and other coercive interventions to minimize the likelihood of re-traumatization. The use of trauma-informed approaches was incorporated into a broad range of service systems, with input from trauma survivors’ perspectives in all aspects of the contract.

NCTIC was guided by the fundamental beliefs that people with personal experiences of trauma can and do recover and heal; trauma-informed care is the hallmark of effective programs to promote recovery and healing through support from peers, consumers, survivors, ex-patients, and recovering persons and mentoring by providers; and leadership teams of peers and providers charting the course for the implementation of trauma-informed care are essential.

As one of the earliest national organizations to recognize the importance of trauma, NCTIC is proud of its contributions to establishing trauma-informed care as a powerful social movement involving agencies, communities, and states across the country. Its work with federal partners and trauma survivors fueled a deeper understanding of how best to meet the needs of individuals who have experienced trauma.

Work included:

• A blog series titled From Trauma-Aware to Trauma-Informed: Implementing SAMHSA’s Six Principles
• Three virtual learning networks
• Three webinar series
• Training curricula on trauma-informed care for all service settings, and trauma-informed services for people living with HIV (PLHIV)
• Trauma-informed peer support service briefs, fact sheets, guides, issue briefs, etc.

Select products developed included:

• Reducing Seclusion and Restraint by Creating Trauma-Informed Service Systems: An Issue Brief for Policymakers on Trauma-Informed Practices
• Best Practices in the Use of Restraints with Pregnant Women Under Correctional Custody
• Essential Components of Trauma-Informed Judicial Practice
• Promoting Prevention through Trauma-Informed Practices: Seclusion and Restraint Efforts since 1998
• Engaging Women in Trauma-Informed Peer Support: A Guidebook
• Minority AIDS Initiative special products such as:

1. Trauma-Informed Approaches to HIV Testing
2. Trauma-Informed Approaches to Care Transitions
3. Trauma-Informed Approaches to Supporting Older Adults LHIV
4. Trauma-Informed Approaches at the Intersection of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and PLHIV
5. Trauma-Informed Approaches for Working with Transgender or Gender Non-Conforming (TGNC) PLHIV
6. Trauma-Informed Approaches to Substance Use and PLHIV

 

 

The National Veterans Technical Assistance Center (NVTAC) was a partnership among AHP, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Veterans Employment and Training Services. Led by AHP and funded under a cooperative agreement for four years, the NVTAC supported the mission of the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program (HVRP) and its stakeholders. We assembled a cadre of experts knowledgeable about veteran homelessness, workforce development, and adult learning that included veterans committed to helping their service member colleagues.

We tapped the experience of practitioners in the field by facilitating peer-to-peer learning in our national virtual learning community; spotlighting individual grantees and their staff to inform the field and through regional face-to-face events. AHP worked with grantees and convened experts to establish 10 best-practice elements showcased on the NVTAC website and supported implementation through webinars and training.
 
Our work was responsive to our client’s needs. When Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast, we reached out to grantees with resources and established a go-to website for community recovery. When direct service staff needed to build their skills, but grantee organizations could not afford to send staff to training sites, we developed online, instructor-led courses. As more communities wanted to host veteran stand-down events and DOL sought to support these, AHP prepared materials and a website to ease the challenge of organizing an event.
 
We measured learning impacts. Following training, we not only asked if participants were satisfied, we also asked about what they learned and if their participation led to changes in their behavior, practice, or policy.
 
Through NVTAC, AHP quickly became the go-to source for a broad range of technical assistance, training, and policy advice on veterans’ homelessness programs and issues to existing and potential audiences. This has been done through:

• developing, conducting, and documenting extensive outreach efforts to national, state, and local employers to increase their awareness of HVRP, HFVVWF, IVTP, and SD in order to increase employment and training opportunities for veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness;
• identifying, extracting, documenting, and sharing best practices or other case-study-oriented overviews, as defined and directed by VETS;
• assisting VETS leadership by suggesting and conducting research and program improvement-based studies, as ultimately defined and directed by VETS; and 
• providing consulting to an external national evaluation of the HVRP.

Among the major accomplishments in this project, AHP developed remote service-informed technical assistance and research-driven virtual training to grantees in settings ranging from urban to rural across the nation, serving women veterans, incarcerated veterans, veterans in families, Native American veterans, and single male veterans. Training topics included improving employment outcomes to justice-involved veterans, approaches to job-driven training, and meeting the needs of veterans with behavioral health and other challenges. In addition, NVTAC has provided onsite grantee-specific assistance to improve program operations, integrate use of best practices, and achieve desired outcomes in the Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco regions. NVTAC developed a number of electronic and print materials, including brief video interviews with experienced grantees, briefing papers, research results, website updates, and a self-paced elearning course on job retention for veterans.
 
Related resources and publications:

• Website: http://www.nvtac.org/about-us/
• Resources (including videos and documents): http://www.nvtac.org/resources/