Partnership With Christian Street YMCA

As a trusted gathering site that serves and is staffed primarily by community members, the Christian Street YMCA is well-positioned to provide trauma-informed support and care for Philadelphia community members, especially children and adolescents.

CVP researchers were introduced to Ronna Kassel, executive director of the Christian Street YMCA, in fall 2019 during Community-Driven Research Day (CDRD). Since then, CVP investigators and the YMCA staff have worked toward the mutual goal of creating and sustaining resilient communities. This community partnership has built on the strengths of the YMCA, its staff, members, and the surrounding neighborhood and has resulted in programming and resources to address trauma and violence. 

Healthy Bodies and Healthy Minds

With funding from a one-year CDRD grant, the YMCA-CHOP team developed and piloted the Healthy Bodies Healthy Minds project. Our teams co-designed and implemented trauma-informed care training  for summer camp counselors and a brief series of educational activities. These activities were designed to build emotional awareness and coping skills to address stress and trauma among summer campers at the YMCA.

We first implemented this training and camp activities in summer 2021. We surveyed the YMCA staff before and after training to measure changes in knowledge and self-efficacy in implementing trauma-informed practices. We also collected feedback from YMCA staff about their experiences conducting the camp activities through surveys, interviews, and team meetings to assess the relevance, acceptability, and feasibility of the camp curriculum. This feedback was integral to refining both the training and camp activities to make them more relevant and to enhance engagement prior to a second round of implementation in summer 2022.

Accomplishments

• Following a brief training, summer camp staff reported increased knowledge of how to apply trauma-informed practices in their work with young people.
• Camp staff reported that the activities were easy to follow with a high degree of comfort using the provided activity materials. Our project team enhanced the activities prior to summer 2022, in response to staff feedback and recommendations.
• YMCA staff continued to integrate the summer camp activities more broadly into both youth and staff programming during the summer of 2023. Staff shared that they feel comfortable employing the skills developed. 

Defining and Implementing Trauma-Informed Practices

As a continuation of our collaboration built during the Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds project, members of the YMCA leadership team were interested in learning more about how to support staff members implementing trauma-informed practices across the YMCA. This interest led to our partnership for a second project, Defining and Implementing Trauma-Informed Practices, funded by a two-year grant from PolicyLab’s Community Partnerships in Research Program. Although awareness of the importance of trauma-informed practices is common within medical and mental health fields, there is an urgent need to understand what it means to implement these practices in community-based programs.

With that goal, our YMCA-CHOP team worked to enhance competence and confidence among YMCA staff to deliver community-based programming in trauma-informed ways. We also learned more about the resources and supports needed to prepare and sustain staff in using trauma-informed practices in their work. 

With an eye toward ensuring project findings were valid and meaningful to the YMCA community, a key component of our methodology was inclusion of diverse perspectives as part of our core study team. This included not only YMCA and CVP research leaders, but also staff with expertise working with the YMCA community. Team members attend project meetings, co-created data collection tools and analytic frameworks, presented findings at conferences, and were critical voices in interpreting findings and identifying practical solutions for supporting the YMCA’s already robust trauma-informed culture. 

We conducted this project in two distinct phases. In Phase 1, we completed interviews with YMCA staff members to understand existing expertise, knowledge, and needs related to trauma awareness and practices. Key findings from these interviews included perceptions that exposure to potentially traumatic events were nearly universal among staff and YMCA members and that staff were widely and skillfully implementing trauma-informed practices in their work.  

In Phase 2, based on staff recommendations, our team co-developed, implemented, and evaluated a resource to support staff use of trauma-informed practices. We created “Stress Cards,” which were distributed to all summer camp staff. The cards provided strategies to help staff both recognize stress reactions and pause and reset in stressful moments. In qualitative interviews, staff members reported that the cards were highly acceptable, easy to use, and helped them check in with their own emotions, as well as helping others. Staff members reported using the skills not just in the context of their work at the YMCA, but also outside of work, suggesting the resource had broad utility.

Community-focused dissemination has been a central focus of our work. This includes preparing executive summaries of key findings for YMCA organizational leadership and summaries which were shared directly back to the staff who participated in our project.