Sharing Knowledge to Support the Community: How Learning Communities Support Trauma-Informed Programs
By Brandon Martinez, Research Associate
In East Harlem, the Center for Trauma Innovation is building a learning community so organizations can exchange innovative practices, learn from each other, and tap into each others’ resources to better serve their community with trauma-informed, evidence-based practices.
Learning communities are collaborative networks of individuals and organizations that, through sharing knowledge and experiences with each other, can advance the use of emerging and innovative practices. Their use allows programs and practitioners to learn from one another and create and sustain collaborative networks of like-minded organizations and stakeholders.
One program in East Harlem—the Exodus Center for Trauma Innovation (CTI) – is working with an evaluation team at the Center for Complex Trauma (CCT) at Icahn School of Medicine to create a learning community to support its community-based, trauma healing initiative. Using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, the CCT evaluation team is working with the CTI to understand the program’s implementation and impact. In a recently published brief, the team detailed interim findings about developing a learning community for the initiative.
For more information about CCT’s ongoing evaluation of the CTI, visit the CTI Evaluation page.
Building a Trauma-Informed Learning Community
In 2017, Exodus Transitional Community (ETC) was funded by the Criminal Justice Investment Initiative (CJII)—a partnership between CUNY ISLG and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (DANY)—to develop the Center for Trauma Innovation (CTI). The CTI aims to serve participants who have experienced chronic trauma related, but not limited, to incarceration, poverty, racism, and experiencing/witnessing community violence. It does so through three core prongs: direct services, training and technical assistance, and a learning community.
By working with similar organizations, learning community members can collaboratively learn and share best practices and new approaches to ensure that services are delivered in up-to-date, culturally relevant, and locally grounded approaches.
Using a learning community can help improve program implementation, participant experiences, and organizational growth through two primary mechanisms. First, by working with similar organizations, learning community members can collaboratively learn and share best practices and new approaches to ensure that services are delivered in up-to-date, culturally relevant, and locally grounded approaches. Access to the knowledge and resources of their peers helps organizations provide their own participants with improved services. This is not only useful for improving service delivery within an organization; learning communities can also enable organizations to create partnerships for service referrals, giving their participants access to programming that spans beyond a particular organization’s offerings to better address a participant’s needs. This is particularly important for organizations like the CTI that are part of the emerging field of trauma healing practices, which draw on innovative approaches to better address participants' complex needs – including those that are material, social, and health-related. Moreover, a robust network of trauma-informed programs is better positioned to respond to changing needs in the community, including health crises, housing shortages, and community safety.
Strengthening Learning Communities through Research
Evaluation teams can play an important role in developing and sustaining learning communities. The CCT is currently working with the CTI to shape the vision for its own learning community through its CBPR evaluation design. CBPR allows programs and other stakeholders to be equitably involved in all aspects of the research process. Working with programs, evaluation teams can embed themselves within program operations to best understand its capacity, needs, and obstacles while leveraging their own methods and knowledge to support program implementation. The CCT spends time regularly at the CTI, where it conducts focus groups and interviews with participants, as well as hosts and participates in meetings with program staff. Their collaboration ensures that evaluation methods are not only sensitive to participants’ unique needs, but also robust enough to fully understand how they heal from trauma. In the case of the CTI’s learning community, the CCT team can collect and analyze data to understand program needs, identify existing and potential organizational networks to build on their strengths, and support the program's ongoing collaboration and communication with other stakeholders locally and nationally.
Determine Function and Purpose
Based on their conversations, the CTI’s learning community should “provide a space for the generation, organization, and dissemination” of trauma-informed knowledge. This knowledge ranges from the impact of incarceration trauma on individuals and communities to innovative approaches to treating trauma.
Define Learning Community Membership
With an understanding of the CTI’s organizational needs and the importance of its many stakeholders, the kinds of people involved in the CBPR should be broad and encompass community members, credible messengers, researchers, policy makers, and more to ensure an inclusive and innovative network.
Determine the Appropriate Structure
Given the CTI’s unique trauma-informed and collaborative approach to delivering services and coordinating with other programs in East Harlem, its learning community should create a space for this wide range of members—including those impacted by the criminal legal system—to both teach and learn from each other, as well as increase organizational capacity and foster relationship building.
The CTI and CCT teams are currently collaborating to support the program’s implementation of a learning community and share evaluation findings for other programs and researchers to better understand best practices. For more information about the CCT evaluation of the CTI, visit the CTI Evaluation page.
The CCT and CTI teams recently conducted a series of reflective conversations about the development of a learning community. Drawing from their collective experiences working with and observing trauma-informed programs, the two teams identified three key actions to implement a learning community at the CTI.
About the Criminal Justice Investment Initiative
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Justice Investment Initiative (CJII) focuses on three investment areas—crime prevention, diversion and reentry, and supports for survivors of crime. The CTI and this evaluation were funded through CJII’s crime prevention-focused investments in Diversion & Reentry.
The CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance manages and provides technical assistance to CJII contractors, and conducts oversight and performance measurement throughout the lifetime of the initiative.