Resource Parent Curriculum

Tanisha Grimes, PhD, MPH, shares her agency’s process for building a trauma-informed parenting program in her state from the ground up. In 2014, her agency was contracted to provide trauma-informed trainings across the state. Shortly thereafter, she and her team began researching approaches to engaging stakeholders, managing logistics, and deciding implementation practices. During this podcast, Tanisha shares how she often felt like she had been thrown “in the deep end” of RPC implementation but over time learned to swim.

Kristin Barker, MSW, LCSW and her team began implementing the Caring for Children Who Have Experienced Trauma: A Workshop for Resource Parents as a group therapy intervention in November, 2012, thanks to funding from the St. Louis Mental Health Board. They have since expanded this workshop to include biological parents, relatives, and kinship providers in addition to foster/adoptive parents and deliver the curriculum over the course of 12 weekly 75-minute sessions. Integrating this material into traditional group therapy is one example of the various ways organizations across the country are adapting and using this curriculum to meet client needs. In this recording, Kristin Barker shares her suggestions for modifying the curriculum to ensure psychological safety while staying true to the material.

Katie Jackson, MA, LPC, talks about how One Hope United’s approach to implementing this curriculum has evolved over time with a special emphasis on their switch from having a team of clinicians facilitate to bringing in co-facilitators with lived expertise. Katie will then share not only how their current approach has enhanced participant engagement and learning but has produced other amazingly positive consequences as well.

Beth Barto, LMHC and Diane Lanni, Foster Parent teamed up for the first time in a quest to disseminate RPC workshops statewide through ACF grant funding. In this podcast they share their approach to preparing to facilitate together in a way that allows for the blending of Beth's clinical reasoning and Diane's lived expertise to bridge trauma concepts with real life parenting moments.