Public Engagement for Child Protection
On July 3 I wrote about the Child Development Policing Program, an innovative collaboration between the Minneapolis Police Department and community and university partners "to increase access to services for children who are traumatized and ultimately to ameliorate the impact of violence on children."
Abilgail Gewirtz, the Director of the program, informed me that the Child Development Policing Program is part of a bigger program, the Minnesota Child Response Center (MnCRC), which in turn is part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)'s National Child Traumatic Stress Network, as a Community Treatment and Services Center. There are seventeen current collaborators with MnCRC, including community groups, state, county, and city agencies, and the University of Minnesota Insitute of Child Development. The MnCRC enumerates five goals:
- Increase access to trauma-informed services through acute police-mental health intervention, screening, and referral of traumatized children in our target community
- Adapt and disseminate two best practice treatment approaches: Trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Parenting Through Change
- Establish broad community and provider consensus on the mental health needs of traumatized children and the best practices to address these needs
- Create sustainable change
- Work with NCTSN to expand reach throughout Minnesota and the upper Midwest.
In addition,
The Minnesota Child Response Center will work closely with the National Network and its treatment services and community treatment sites to disseminate and expand the use of best practices, to offer knowledge regarding uptake of best practice treatments in the target community, and to significantly contribute to network efforts to implement screening in order to enhance the capacity of frontline providers to access mental health services for traumatized children.With a broad base of community expertise via mental health providers, culturally specific and mainstream social service providers, supportive housing agencies, schools, police, child service systems, and University of Minnesota researchers, Minnesota Child Response Center partner agencies reach more than ten thousand traumatized children annually, predominantly homeless and formerly homeless inner city African-American, American Indian, Latino, and war-surviving refugee/immigrant children and families.
The MnCRC also has a research component, whose goal is "to improve the knowledge and understanding of the effects of exposure to violence and trauma on children over time, and inform the design of effective intervention and prevention programs for children at high risk."
This partnership of university, community, and governmental resources to address a crucial social problem by research and practical action is a striking model of public engagement.