Issue 32 | July 2024

The Western Regional Children's Advocacy Center provides training and technical assistance to State Chapters, Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs), and multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) to build their capacity to provide an effective, trauma-informed response to child abuse. A key element of this capacity building is developing cultural responsiveness. The Diversity, Equity, and Access standard in the 2023 National Standards of Accreditation for Children’s Advocacy Centers emphasizes that cultural responsiveness is “as central to operations as developmentally appropriate, child-focused, and trauma-informed practice.” To increase cultural responsiveness, the standard requires CACs to develop policies, procedures, and practices to reduce disparities in service access and outcomes, and to ensure values of equity and inclusion are evident in practice.

So what might these policies, procedures, and practices look like? This is one of the many questions the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) explored through the “Becoming Anti-Racist is Central to Trauma-Informed Care” Anti-Racism Summit (ARS) Initiative, which NCTSN launched in 2020 after many years of discussion and planning. NCTSN member sites were eligible to complete a team-based application process to participate in the initiative, with the expressed goal of these teams “moving beyond awareness to action” when addressing the relationship between racism and trauma.  Throughout the initiative, the ARS faculty worked with Dr. Wizdom Powell and the Evidence Watch Collective to develop the resource “Being Anti-Racist is Central to Trauma-Informed Care: Principles of an Anti-Racist, Trauma-Informed Organization.” This resource defines actionable principles and strategies that organizations can implement to “shift beyond performative action toward the fundamental transformation of becoming anti-racist and trauma-informed", with a focus on addressing anti-Black racism given its entrenchment and impact in our society. The NCTSN hosted a second Anti-Racism Summit in October 2023 and continues to engage its members in this critical work.

The Chadwick Center for Children & Families (the home of WRCAC) is an accredited CAC and an NCTSN member site who has participated in both NCTSN ARS initiatives. Out of this initiative work, an “Anti-Racism Workgroup” was created at the Chadwick Center in 2020, which has since evolved into the “Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Anti-Racism (IDEA) Workgroup”.  The IDEA Workgroup is made up of staff members representing different roles, programs, and racial identities, who are united by a shared commitment to helping the Chadwick Center become an anti-racist, trauma informed CAC. The group meets monthly to discuss how they can influence Chadwick to become more anti-racist across various domains, including external messaging and partnerships, organizational policies and practices, service delivery, and organizational culture. Change has come slowly but surely. The workgroup has engaged CAC staff in training and conversations on these topics during all-staff meetings and expanded these conversations to Chadwick’s annual conference. For the 2024 San Diego International Conference on Child and Family Maltreatment, the workgroup assisted with defining the theme - “Centering Our Work in Equity” - and helped establish review criteria that prioritized proposals incorporating DEI. There were more DEI proposals for each track than were expected, which marked a major shift in the conference. Additionally, the workgroup hosted the first “BIPOC Forum” at the conference, which was met with a very positive response from attendees who identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC). On other fronts, change has been slower. A long-standing goal of the workgroup is to increase the hiring, retention, and promotion of Black staff at the center to reflect the demographics of the clients served. Chadwick has made some progress over the last few years with hiring Black clinical staff, but there is still work to be done to increase representation, especially among the leadership team. Staff at Chadwick have shared this representation goes a long way in creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment, not only for Black families, but also for Black staff. As stated in Component D of the Diversity, Equity, and Access accreditation standard, these ongoing efforts “to recruit, hire, and retain staff, volunteers, and board members who reflect the demographics of the community... is critical to achieving an overall response to children and families that is inclusive, relevant, and effective.”

To gain insight into Chadwick’s experience with engaging in anti-racist work, WRCAC sat down with three key members of the IDEA Workgroup: the workgroup co-chairs Rochelle Chavis, LCSW and DeAndrea King, LCSW, and Chadwick’s Executive Director and IDEA Workgroup member, Lisa Conradi, PsyD. The following themes emerged from the conversation and may shed light on a path forward for other CACs and MDTs who are striving towards anti-racist action: 

Create Space for Conversation - The creation of the IDEA Workgroup at Chadwick established a space for dedicated staff to engage in ongoing conversations about anti-racist policies and procedures at an organizational level. Recently, the workgroup has started the book Inclusion on Purpose and engaged in conversations on how to implement the book’s principles at Chadwick. Rochelle noted, however, “it takes everybody's buy-in to get there, not just a few who are willing to do the work”. Thus, the workgroup has begun bringing conversations to leadership meetings and all-staff meetings at Chadwick. This effort has been met with resistance from some staff, which has prompted the workgroup to clarify how these conversations align with the organization’s mission and values. An actionable strategy proposed by the ARS initiative is the creation of “active, sustained, brave spaces for open and honest dialogue, as well as the exploration of Eurocentric worldviews and privilege, self-reflection, and perspective-taking.” While “safe spaces” prioritize non-judgement and support, “brave spaces” invite individuals to lean-in to discomfort through dialogue and accountability. Ideally, organizations will cultivate spaces where people feel both supported and challenged (Break Away, 2023). It is also important to recognize that conversations are the start – not the end – of anti-racist work. 

Build Trust – In order to have truly “brave” conversations, staff must trust each other. For the ARS faculty, relationship building has been a guiding value. To model the “relational work of anti-racism", the ARS Faculty use “fishbowl” discussions, in which participants observe how ARS faculty engage with each other on complex topics. Similarly at Chadwick, the IDEA Workgroup has realized that they must be able to engage in these challenging conversations within the workgroup if they hope to effectively engage staff outside the workgroup. Participating in the ARS summit helped the involved workgroup members build trust and laid a foundation for brave conversations at Chadwick. It is important to note that this trust-building process takes time, and it is not necessarily linear. Rochelle noted that “you can go in and out of trust” - an individual may be open to sharing in some conversations while in others they may just want to take-in information. Additionally, trust-building is informed by staff experience and identity. Staff of color may be hesitant to engage in conversations at first, especially if the organization’s work on anti-racism has been historically performative rather than actionable, and/or if they feel they are being tokenized. DeAndrea also expressed the importance of self-reflection when engaging in these conversations - “look inward to yourself first - what are your biases? Then engage with another group and hear their stories. That helps build the trust - seeing people actively engaged.”

Get Buy-In from Leadership - To bolster the visibility, sustainability, and impact of brave spaces, meaningful support from leadership is needed. Rochelle and DeAndrea both advised expressing to leadership the importance of this work and “how it directly relates to trauma work and the work we do with children and families.” IDEA Workgroup representatives met with Chadwick leadership to present the NCTSN article and highlight the importance of DEI work and buy-in at a leadership level. Leaders who are bought-in should not only vocalize their support of the work, but also seek to integrate it into organizational goal-setting efforts, as this provides a degree of accountability. At Chadwick, this has looked like tying DEI goals into the organization’s strategic plan, with a focus on training, data, public relations, and hiring policies. “We’re putting it in writing,” Rochelle shared, “it’s on a working document that is shared with everybody. This promotes transparency and sets the expectation.” Additionally, the NCA Accreditation requirements create an impetus for this work – Chadwick’s strategic plan dictates that one All-Staff meeting a year will incorporate a mandatory DEI training, which supports staff in meeting the accreditation requirement to participate in a minimum of eight hours of DEI training every two years However, even with leadership buy-in at the MDT or CAC level, CACs like Chadwick who are situated within a larger organization such as a hospital may experience challenges if the infrastructure is not yet in place at a broader level, and this can slow the pace of change. Still, a deep commitment to this work at the CAC level can push the needle forward, and it is beneficial for CAC staff to become involved with the work happening within the broader organization. The IDEA Workgroup is collaborating with the Rady Children’s Hospital DEI Council to promote Unconscious Bias Training and Inclusive Hiring Training for leaders. Support from the hospital's DEI Council has also been critical in moving this work forward at Chadwick.

Establish a Baseline – In order to set measurable goals related to anti-racist action, you must first have a sense of your baseline. As Rochelle noted, “you don’t know if you’re improving or not improving if you don’t have a baseline.” Chadwick has been attempting to gather baseline data on the demographics of both staff and clients as they seek to increase representation among staff and close gaps in service delivery. However, obtaining this data has been more difficult than anticipated. Due to being situated within a larger organization, access to some data is restricted, and the quality of data that is accessible can be hard to judge. Lisa noted that “data is only as good as how you ask the question... if somebody comes to us with a chart that was created in another department, we don’t know how that department asked the question, how the family answered the question, or how safe the family felt answering the question... there’s a lot of layers to unpack.”

Learn from Others - When determining where to begin with this work (or where to go next when you get stuck), it can be helpful to plug-in to existing resources and leverage your network. For Chadwick, engaging in the ARS initiatives and utilizing the Principles document provided language and structure for conversation and goal setting. DeAndrea shared, “a foundation was being laid for other organizations to follow – it gave us something to utilize so that we weren’t completely starting from scratch.” Seeking consultation from other CACs can also be a valuable source of feedback and ongoing support, especially as CACs seek to meet the Diversity, Equity, and Access accreditation standard. "This is not the work of a 3-year cycle or initiative,” Lisa reminds us, “this is the work of a lifetime.”

When we recognize how racism shapes the trauma of BIPOC families we serve - and the importance of these families seeing themselves represented in helping spaces - taking anti-racist action becomes a trauma-informed imperative. If you are seeking support in implementing anti-racist principles in your CAC or MDT, reach out to us at wrcac@rchsd.org.

Break Away. (2023, November 8). Do we need safe or brave spaces? https://www.break-away.org/blog/do-we-need-safe-or-brave-spaces

WRCAC is supported by cooperative agreement #15PJDP-22-GK-03062-JJVO awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice.

The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this product are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.