A commitment to vulnerable populations and the systems designed to assist them is shared by Lena Harris, MSW, implementation specialist at UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) and Robin Jenkins, PhD, FPG senior implementation specialist. This is reflected in their work providing implementation support to The Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice (CTRJJ) at the University of Connecticut Health Center. CTRJJ, which is affiliated with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, “supports a comprehensive framework for developing, adopting, implementing, and sustaining evidence-based, trauma-informed services for youth in, or at risk for, juvenile justice involvement, and their families.”
 
UConn, which received the funding for this project from the Substance Abuse Mental Health and Services Administration, asked FPG to join the project in 2023, its second year. While the UConn team had developed a host of materials, projects, models, tools, and aids for their technical assistance (TA) approach, they realized that they weren’t incorporating implementation best practices. Harris and Jenkins joined the project to supplement the TA model with a goal of supporting CTRJJ faculty in their design and creation of various strategies to enhance partner readiness, adoption, and use of CTRJJ resources. Through stronger engagement, readiness building, and coaching supports, Harris and Jenkins hoped to co-facilitate improved implementation outcomes for the CTRJJ team itself.
 
Jenkins and Harris’s work focuses on helping CTRJJ faculty members, TA providers, and implementation support practitioners be better informed regarding implementation science-informed best practices and have better tools to support various capacity-building activities primarily centered on building or enhancing trauma-informed, trauma-recognizing, and trauma-recovery workforce development systems and juvenile justice systems change. With this “coach the coaches” model, the FPG team is helping CTRJJ accomplish its work plan by understanding how to assess and develop implementation-ready practices that practically and realistically engage their partners.
 
CTRJJ achieves its goals in a variety of ways, including creating accessible resources with information about becoming more trauma-informed and making that information widely accessible to other groups working in the juvenile justice arena. These resources include the podcast, “Roadmap for Change,” on which Jenkins was recently a guest. During his interview on the episode, “Change That Sticks: Implementation Science & Staff Retention,” Jenkins shared insights on the importance of implementation sciences as a way to improve outcomes and the impact of adversity and trauma on children, families, and systems.
 
Jenkins notes that there are practices that either unintentionally and perhaps even intentionally contribute to traumatic stress and traumatic responses in children and families. He believes that the work he and Harris are supporting can help practitioners, policymakers, and judicial leaders understand how systems create traumagenic practices and responses, helping them address those resulting in better outcomes, not only for the children and families experiencing the system, but for system staff and practitioners.
 
Jenkins lauds the dedicated CTRJJ faculty, noting the extraordinary work they have done in creating smart, evidence-supported, tailored resources to help reduce traumagenic activities in all levels of the juvenile justice system and improve trauma responses throughout those systems.  
 
Currently, Harris’s and Jenkins’s focus is helping CTRJJ develop a readiness and engagement process for its Trauma-informed Juvenile Court Self-Assessment (TIJCSA). This comprehensive capacity assessment and strategic planning tool supports jurisdictions in assessing what trauma-informed practice currently looks like and what it could look like by applying trauma-informed principles. The eight elements benchmarked in this tool range from trauma-informed programming in facilities to the experience of going through the court system.

“We might expect that this work could bring more attention and responsiveness to the trauma needs of the children and youth who are involved in the system,” said Harris. “We would hope that this would result in children and youth being connected to services that meet their needs, so that after the children are screened and trauma histories are identified, they are matched with the right interventions.”

The self-assessment is designed so that it can be completed at different levels of the juvenile justice system, ranging from the entire system to solely probation units/departments, community programs, or detention centers. After this self-assessment, a jurisdiction (or units within it) will be better positioned to determine how to strategically plan to improve trauma-informed practices.
 
Harris said that she and Jenkins have been working with the CTRJJ faculty to determine the barriers to having various leaders engage with that tool. They are building a readiness process for the CTRJJ staff to work with people interested in doing the self-assessment. The goal is to support those in the field through the initial assessment of their resources as well as understanding the tool, the time needed to complete it, various levels of authority and leadership required, and other individuals needed.
 
In addition to examining effective engagement practices, CTRJJ is exploring—with Harris and Jenkins—how to deliver on practical next steps including plans, policies, and procedures that will translate trauma-informed best practices into court systems.
 
The focus and most direct impact from the work of Harris and Jenkins is the implementation support they provide to the CTRJJ faculty. Harris said that there is a great potential for impact as CTRJJ shores up their processes and leans on implementation science best practices.
 
“We might expect that this work could bring more attention and responsiveness to the trauma needs of the children and youth who are involved in the system,” said Harris. “We would hope that this would result in children and youth being connected to services that meet their needs, so that after the children are screened and trauma histories are identified, they are matched with the right interventions.”

“People often don't think of implementation as system change that improves systems so that they are truly beneficial to the folks experiencing them,” said Jenkins. “Implementation, when done well, can improve system performance and create better outcomes for those experiencing those systems. When you invite implementation practitioners into a human-centered design function to think how to make systems better and more trauma-sensitive, trauma healing, trauma recovering, you can get significantly better outcomes at population levels while also improving the system practices themselves.”

She noted that progress made in supporting the juvenile justice community may expand the vision of other child-serving environments, such as child welfare or behavioral health, and encourage supportive efforts in those systems as well. “Implementation science best practice and support can have a positive impact on efforts in agencies serving children and families in some capacity,” she said.
 
Jenkins agreed. “People often don't think of implementation as system change that improves systems so that they are truly beneficial to the folks experiencing them,” he said. “Implementation, when done well, can improve system performance and create better outcomes for those experiencing those systems. When you invite implementation practitioners into a human-centered design function to think how to make systems better and more trauma-sensitive, trauma healing, trauma recovering, you can get significantly better outcomes at population levels while also improving the system practices themselves.”