What Is Connecting With Care?
The Goals of Connecting With Care
Special Approaches, Tailored to the Needs of the Community
How Does Connecting With Care Work?
Recent Publication on CWC: Levraging Mental Health Dollars in Schools
Blue Cross Foundation of MA Highlights CWC
Connecting With Care reaches out to children and families to help them cope with emotional challenges in the face of trauma in Dorchester, Roxbury, and neighboring communities in Boston. The program is a community-guided, culturally competent mental health system reform and treatment model that brings a specialization in trauma and a focus on local sustainability.
AIP coordinates with community mental health providers to place full-time counselors at each Connecting With Care school. These clinicians provide therapy to children in school during the school hours and then work with families two nights a week at the centrally located CWC Evening Family Clinic at the Frederick School. The Evening Family Clinic significantly reduces barriers to care by providing transportation and childcare, when needed, to families using the clinic. In 2008, six full-time Connecting With Care clinicians will be providing mental health services in five schools in the neighborhood, plus additional services to families through our Evening Family Clinic.
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Connecting With Care increases the local community’s capacity to provide comprehensive mental health treatment, with a trauma focus, to local youth and families. By addressing key barriers that providers and families face, the project:
- Reduces racial and ethnic disparities in access to mental health treatment.
- Addresses the stigma often associated with mental health issues that can be a significant obstacle to seeking out treatment.
- Develops the sustainable capacity of local providers and local community institutions to provide mental health supports to this community’s children and families, including an informed response to the impact of trauma.
- Establishes a Standard of Care for Quality School-Based Child Mental Health Services.
- Demonstrates that a strategic core private investment can leverage over 200% more funding in public money for services for children at high risk.
- Demonstrates a viable project design that stimulates more mental health services in schools.
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Connecting With Care uses an array of treatment modalities and incorporates a special team approach to helping children who have been exposed to trauma, guided by the principles of Trauma Systems Therapy (TST). Trauma Systems Therapy is an innovative multi-disciplinary model that focuses on the child’s trauma symptoms and on the environmental conditions that perpetuate them. It brings together the resources of individual therapy, family treatment, home-based services, psychiatry, psychopharmacology, advocacy, and school/community supports to help the child and family to reduce the conditions that exacerbate symptoms and to learn new skills for coping with the impact of trauma.
Through Project SHIFA, a new program led by Children’s Hospital Boston, CWC also enables Somali students in the Boston Public Schools to receive culturally competent school-based clinical services delivered by individuals from within the Somali community. Operating out of the Frederick School, Project SHIFA is a partnership between Children’s Hospital Boston, Connecting With Care, the Somali Development Center, Boston University School of Social Work, and the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School. Project SHIFA draws on the shared resources of these partners, using Trauma Systems Therapy and the CWC Evening Family Clinic to help Somali youth and families cope with the impact of trauma on their mental health.
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The diagram below illustrates the typical pathway through treatment of a child from a Connecting With Care school who receives services from CWC.
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