Trauma aware to trauma-informed: a new framework to improve practice launched today!

Today I am immensely proud that Homeless Link has published a new practice development framework to support homelessness services and organisations on their journey to being trauma-informed.

The framework has been 18 months in the making; drawing on the evidence and resources that exist internationally, the insights from homelessness services, and the lived experience of those who have experienced homelessness.?

The interactive tool is structured around three key areas of trauma-informed practice. These are trauma awareness, creating safety and rebuilding control. It sets out different aims and practice indicators for reflecting on what those core principles look like in service delivery, staff management and leadership and governance.

Homeless Link supports a broad range of organisations offering all types of services to tackle homelessness. Our framework is applicable to organisations of any size, as well as different types of services (and organisations/services outside of the homelessness sector should find it useful too!).

Our aim is not to tell you exactly what your practice should be, but enable you and your colleagues to reflect on the principles in depth, and consider what is working well and where things can be improved. We want to help you move from being ‘trauma aware’ to ‘trauma-informed’ and help services embed their understanding of trauma in their policies, procedures and practice.

With the extremely high prevalence of trauma amongst people experiencing homelessness, and the exposure of staff to traumatising incidents and stories in their work, we believe this tool is a really important step to reduce the traumatisation and re-traumatisation that can unfortunately and unintentionally happen in the homelessness field.

But we’re also calling on the next government to create the conditions that are required within national and local systems to enable trauma-informed services and organisations to thrive. Later this week we’ll be publishing a policy briefing which sets out our asks and recommendations.

Finally, we are seeking services and organisations to join a national partnership learning programme to understand how organisations are becoming trauma-informed and what the impact of this is.

It’s been exactly 10 years since I came back from my learning exchange to the USA where I learned about what trauma-informed care is and what it means in practice. Considering barely anyone had heard about it back then, it’s amazing to see where things are now. I’ve very much enjoyed being on this journey with Homeless Link’s members and others, and hope we continue to work together to champion TIC and improve the services and systems that exist for people that need them.

Find out more:

Being trauma-informed practice development framework

Being trauma-informed learning programme

Homeless Link’s TIC training and consultancy

(A big shout out to Joanna Turner who led on the development of the framework - great work Jo!)