2025 BAA Trauma Informed Practice Symposium

Title: No Revolution without Relationship: Resistance and Resilience in the Relationship

Description:
For centuries, the caregiver-child relationship has been the target of countless efforts to destabilize communities. Today, the surveillance, criminalization, and dehumanization of caregivers and children through parent-child separations among Black and Indigenous families from immigrant communities. For caregiver-child dyads with histories of immigration trauma, the core fears of early childhood are often exacerbated or confirmed by xenophobic, oppressive, and violent sociopolitical conditions perpetuated against Black and Indigenous migrants. Given these heightened risk factors and alarming realities, there is an even greater need for child welfare workers to understand the impact of immigration trauma on the parent-child relationship in order to create conditions for relational and collective healing. This keynote conversation will invite participants to reflect on the role of child welfare workers in buffering legacies of harm and building resilience through the power of relationships. Strategies for working with moments of rupture and repair and integrating a migrant justice lens approach to our work with families will be discussed.

Objectives:
• Participants will be able to identify the core developmental fears associated with the first five years of life.
• Participants will be able to identify at least 2 parallels between the core fears and anti-immigrant oppression.
• Participants will explore strategies for using moments of rupture and repair within the parent-child relationship as opportunities to realign with social and healing justice principles.

Workshop Presentation: “Culture as Medicine: Indigenous Resilience and Healing” by Raquel Morris and Dr. Matthew Mock

Our country has a dark history of policies leading to family separation in Indigenous communities. Educational, social, and child welfare systems have been used as means for potential cultural erasure. Reflecting on the past provides significant context to the relationship between the child welfare system and Indigenous families in present day. This also provides insights into how cultural communities may view family social services. Separation of children from their parents and cultural communities has been shown to contribute to intergenerational trauma. While this has been substantiated by research, there is also growing knowledge of strengths and resilience derived through Indigenous cultural strategies that are deeply meaningful. In other words, culture as medicine, must be appreciated. Cultural practices, including those that are evidence-based as well as community-defined, conducted with the support of service systems, contributing to empowerment, endurance and cultural healing, will be poignantly presented.

Among the learning objectives for this workshop presentation may include:

• 1) Identifying the multiple historical traumas and stressors of significant Indigenous communities such as land displacement, residential schools, colonization.
• 2) Explaining how child welfare services, used to implement policies, may be viewed by cultural communities including those Indigenous.
• 3) Citing cultural influences contributing to appreciating the work with Indigenous individuals and families. This may include the Medicine Wheel — four directions, role of spirituality, intergenerational trauma.
• 4) Presenting key cultural considerations for child welfare workers for establishing rapport, goals towards wellness, and positive service outcomes through understanding the role of Indigenous healers, ancestral healing approaches, the Four Directions, perspective taking, family and community influences.

This year’s panel will showcase Trauma-Informed practice at-work in our region. Specifically, we would like to highlight efforts to implement Trauma-Informed Practice in the Bay Area Region through child welfare peer-support and resilience groups over the last several years.

Recognizing that secondary trauma is a significant occupational hazard in child welfare, these groups are designed to support staff at varying levels of exposure and help mitigate its impact.

After several years of implementation, the panel will explore the evolution of these county-based peer-support programs, including their development, adaptations, and the challenges of sustaining them over time. Panelists include four facilitators representing peer-support groups from four Bay Area counties.

The discussion will be guided by prepared questions and will also include an open Q&A session with the audience. The panel’s goal is to deepen understanding of how peer-support structures operationalize Trauma-Informed Practice and to share lessons learned, successes, and on-the-ground experiences from group facilitators.