Guiding Principles

Guiding Principles

I. Healing Individuals, Families, and Communities

Linked Systems of Care communities are concerned with the healing of individuals, families, and communities that have experienced or have been exposed to violence. Healing includes safety, justice, the opportunity to make positive social-emotional connections, and self-determination. Opportunities for healing occur at all points of contact; healing interventions are accessible, trauma-informed, strength-based, individualized, and gender and culturally responsive. Parents, caregivers, and children should be meaningfully engaged in decision making for prevention, intervention, and healing. Parents and caregivers are offered coordinated treatment to address their own trauma histories and their reactions to their child’s traumatic experiences. Organizations and communities understand traumatic impact on providers and institute policies that minimize vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress and increase staff resilience.

II. Linked Systems of Care

All systems of care are connected and aspire to maximize their collective impact through communication, collaboration, and coordination. To guide effective Linked Systems of Care, we must:

1. Clarify roles.

2. Create a common vocabulary related to your goals and outcomes.

3. Share information (while ensuring safety and autonomy for individuals and families) to avoid duplicative screening and re-traumatization.

4. Engage traditional and nontraditional community-based partners, including survivor groups.

5. Leverage your resources.

6. Build community capacity to meet victim needs including:

   • Seamless and equitable access to appropriate interventions and supports, and

   • Meaningful referrals.

7. Invest in common screening and assessment tools and principles.

8. Be accountable to one another and the individuals and families you serve.

9. Create mutually informed policy agendas.

III. Informed Decision Making

Linked Systems of Care provide as much information as possible to families and practitioners so that the most targeted, holistic, safe, and effective interventions are available. Further, Linked Systems of Care are crucial to continuous quality improvement to improve and target interventions to meet the needs of children and youth. Decisions are best when informed by circumstances, research, and the needs of children, families, and communities as identified during meaningful engagement processes. Decision makers are best poised when they receive regular ongoing and meaningful training, technical assistance, and resources on the effects of trauma.

Our Goals

The team’s overarching goals encompass more sensitive identification of victimized children/youth; more functional capacity and alignment to common principles across systems; and more seamless access to equitable, appropriate, coordinated and stable trauma-informed supports so that these young people and their families can find a path to healing and achieve their full potential in life. The project stakeholders affirmed early on that, as these children and their families are supported in such ways, Ohio communities likewise will realize benefits.

The project scope puts a priority on improving the identification of and community response to child/youth victims of violence (physical or sexual), including:

LSCOY focuses on issues for victims from birth to 26 years old, a range determined with input from stakeholders. The scope includes victims older than 18 years who might be in high school or college, are being served by programming for transitional-aged youth and/or are receiving health care benefits through a parent’s health care coverage.

In order for young victims of crime to receive the safety, healing and justice they deserve, the systems that serve them need to work effectively. In Ohio, like many states, there are multiple challenges in ensuring help for youth who have experienced traumatic events. The challenges are as numbered and diverse as are Ohio families, communities and systems.

An intensive and methodical strategic planning process was conducted to prioritize needs and address identified gaps through project activities and resources. Promoting trauma screening and linking families to resources are key aspects of the project and are LSCOY’s first two objectives. Through the course or our planning phase the LSCOY project identified eight additional objectives. Each of these objectives, the process used to determine them and action steps to achieve them, are detailed in the LSCOY Strategic Plan.

A report detailing the findings of the Needs Assessment and Gap Analysis is available and may be helpful to policy makers, administrators and program planners in Ohio. We hope that allied professionals will consider how they might use and promote the unique project tools and products to benefit survivors, families, communities and child-serving systems. Further, we encourage agents within child-serving systems or initiatives to connect with the LSCOY Project Team to discuss potential partnerships to help expand the impact of our strategies.

Our Objectives