The Implementation of Mindfulness‐Based, Trauma‐Informed Parent Education in an Underserved Latino Community: The Emergence of a Community Workforce

Abstract

Highlights Community‐led parent education to strengthen resilience in low‐resource community Community‐led partnership was driven by the commitment and cultural expertise of community workforce. Parent education as a new training model to engage and mobilize community resilience

New Perspectives on the Child‐ and Youth‐Serving Workforce in Low‐Resource Communities: Fostering Best Practices and Professional Development

“…While few associations were found, the overall number of organizational‐level supports was positively related to job satisfaction and curriculum implementation and mentoring in particular was associated with more developmentally appropriate attitudes. In a very different approach by Burns, Merritt, Chyu, and Gil (), we learn how the relationships formed between a community volunteer workforce and their academic partners were key to establishing a sustainable, community‐based, parent education program. These papers remind us that much like the youth they serve, practitioners are themselves embedded in personal and professional networks and relationships that are central to effective practice and professional success, but receive comparatively little scholarly attention.…”

Strengthening the Child‐ and Youth‐Serving Workforce: Surveying the Landscape, Overcoming Challenges

“…Articles in this issue by Gopalan, Hooley, Winters, and Stephens (2019) and by Farrell, Collier-Meek, and Furman (2019) illustrate how implementation science frameworks that emphasize fidelity can benefit the work, even when applied to different target populations. Similarly, articles in this issue by Burns, Merritt, Chyu, and Gil (2019) and by Sichel, Burson, Javdani, and Godfrey (2019) show the shared learnings possible when adopting a trauma-informed practice approach, even if adopted in different settings or with different populations.…”

“…Frazier et al (2019) describe how attention to cultural mindfulness made it possible to leverage the expertise and experiences of a diverse staff in four high poverty afterschool sites who were able to turn "obstacles into opportunities." And, Burns et al (2019) describe how a volunteer community workforce of Promotoras helped transform an academic-community research partnership to promote mindfulness-based, trauma-informed parenting.…”

Reducing the Biological and Psychological Toxicity of Poverty‐related Stress: Initial Efficacy of the BaSICS Intervention for Early Adolescents

“…Connecting with others and learning how to participate in collective social action are empowering ways of coping with systemic stressors that can enable individual agency and foster belongingness (Zimmerman et al, 2013). While youth living in poverty may not be able to change the economic circumstances of their family or avoid witnessing crime in their neighborhood, they can join with others to take action in prosocial ways to work toward improving their community (Burns, Merritt, Chyu, & Gil, 2019). Following Guti errez' (1994) call to frame individual ways of coping with stress in the context of collective empowerment, we have sought to develop an intervention that fosters "collaborative coping" whereby learning fundamental coping skills such as problem-solving, emotion regulation, and acceptance is a means to contributing to collective action that changes the social context and is transformative for individuals.…”

“…Via the social action work, which is made possible by the previous two modules' coping and identity skill building, youth voices are heard, acknowledged, valued, and used for action. They become engaged in agentic activities to solve real problems in their community (Burns et al, 2019). Agency, belonging, sense of purpose are hypothesized to empower youth in prosocial ways.…”