Trauma-Informed Care: Resilience

In this episode, “Trauma-informed care: Resilience,” Elevate Youth Programming sat down with Drs. Vicki Johnson-Lawrence and Lissette Saavedra from RTI International to discuss the impact of internal and external factors on trauma-informed approaches and youth resilience. APP programs provide youth with timely, evidenced-based information sexual health education and Adulthood Preparation Subjects (APS), delivered using a Positive Youth Development (PYD) framework to enhance program engagement and effectiveness and support and build youth skills and strengths. By incorporating PYD practices across APS, grantees can enhance program recruitment, retention, and youth engagement and improve pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections and other risk behavior prevention outcomes for participating youth. In this episode, we discussed steps programmatic staff can take to support youth resilience. Dr. Johnson-Lawrence has led community-engaged, behavioral public health initiatives using evidence-based and trauma-informed practices. Her experience is in the areas of community violence prevention; equity, bias, and trauma as context for community violence and mental health problems; and promotion of healthy relationships and safe environments among youth in community settings. Dr. Saavedra has more than 20 years of experience in delivering trauma-informed care to ethnically diverse adolescents. For over 5 years, she provided technical assistance to schools and communities around recruitment and retention of minoritized youth and infusing trauma informed programming in teen pregnancy prevention. The Elevate Youth Programming podcast was developed by RTI International and funded by FYSB. The Elevate Youth Programming content does not reflect the opinions of FYSB, nor its training and technical assistance contractors, but offers topics to provoke thought and provide grantees with tips and strategies to enhance programming.