STARKVILLE, Miss. -- Nearly 100 professionals from across Mississippi met for two days in late October to build Trust-Based Relational Intervention, or TBRI, skills used in their daily work with trauma-exposed children and families.

Participants at the Building Bridges Conference work with children and youth who come from hard spaces such as the foster care system. They already had TBRI skills when they came to the Building Bridges workshop Oct. 22-23 in Starkville, Mississippi to share resources, knowledge and strategies of implementing TBRI.

Lori Elmore-Staton, associate professor in the Mississippi State University School of Human Sciences, said the Building Bridges Conference brought together advocates, social workers, residential care providers, educators, mental healthcare professionals, law enforcement and community members. The goal was to further empower these people who are dedicated to helping children and their caregivers heal from the impact of relational traumas such as divorce or child maltreatment.

“The events not only reinforced collaboration and commitment to supporting youth and families in a trauma-responsive manner across Mississippi but also created opportunities for professionals to unite and advance the systematic implementation of trauma-informed care,” Elmore-Staton said.

Tana Walker, who works in therapeutic foster care with Southern Christian Services in Gulfport, Mississippi, is a TBRI practitioner who attended to learn more strategies and keep her skills fresh.

“Our agency is very involved with TBRI, and we have implemented it into our foster parent training,” Walker said. “We believe the only way to help a child heal is with a trusting relationship. We’ve seen it work.”

The workshop began with Regina Lacking, director of professional development at the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, emphasizing to those in attendance how important it is to learn to connect with young people.

“Where they are now is not where they will be next week,” Lacking said. “We need to learn to meet our adolescents, our young adults, where they are.”

She compared the process of adolescents growing up with making a cake, and that takes time.

“We need to give them grace and space, much like we do with adults,” Lacking said. “We need to treat them the same with their big behaviors or no behaviors at all.”

Naomi Strawhorn, victim services coordinator at CASA of South Mississippi, said making positive choices is a skill young people must learn.

“If we don’t give them choices, if we don’t let them share power with us, then that muscle is underdeveloped,” Strawhorn said. “Until young people practice making good choices, they will make wrong choices, and they have to learn how to get out of them.”

After group lectures each morning, participants broke out into nine breakout sessions or one of five mentor groups for more personal, hands-on training opportunities.

In the session on nurture groups, participants learned the four skills of meaningful relationships, which are the ability to give care, seek or receive care, practice autonomy and negotiate needs. In another session, participants did an activity that visually depicted adverse childhood experiences and then saw how these can be somewhat offset by protective and compensatory experiences.

Katie Rinaudo, training and consultation specialist at the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development out of Texas Christian University, explained the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, or CHAT, which explains much of the principles behind TBRI. She said it is important to identify young people’s needs rather than just the behavioral outcomes desired.

“If we focus on the needs of our people, those outcomes will come, but if we focus on outcomes, we’ll get neither one,” Rinaudo said.

She said if there is a contradiction between what a young person says and what they do, that contradiction is a gift because it reveals that there is something that needs to be addressed.

“Change is driven by contradictions within the system,” she said. “It’s easy to immediately talk to another person about how they handle a similar situation, but what works for them may not work for you. Sit in the need and figure out where in the system the contradiction is happening. There can be different needs behind the same contradiction at different places.”

A second TBRI event was held on Oct. 24 for stakeholders across Mississippi interested in learning more about TBRI implementation. Approximately 50 people representing school districts, courts, child advocacy centers, residential care providers, family services agencies and mental health agencies came together for this event.

The Trauma-Informed Parenting and Professional Strategies, or TIPPS, is a Mississippi Department of Human Services-funded Extension project that hosted the Building Bridges Conference. The MSU Behavioral Health Clinic sponsored the TBRI Stakeholder Event.