News Why Our Healing Brain Course is Key to Family Violence Prevention Why Our Healing Brain Course is Key to Family Violence Prevention November is Family Violence Prevention Month and we’re featuring the work ACWS is doing towards ending family violence. Let’s Connect: A Conversation with Mel Willerth, Member Program Development & Training Coordinator Q: What is the Healing Brain course? A: It’s a course designed for people working with children who have faced various types of trauma. It helps them better understand how they can help these kids bounce back. Trauma is often caused by adverse childhood experiences (also known as ACEs), which can include experiencing or seeing domestic violence. Kids who have a lot of ACEs face long lasting impacts like higher chances of stroke, suicide, heart condition, substance use, liver damage, and the list goes on and one. But there is good news! The course explores research into brain elasticity because our brain, even when faced with trauma, can bounce back with the right supports and inputs. For a kid who has experienced ACEs, having one stable person in their life—one person to show compassion, care, kindness and love—that can be enough to help their brain re-wire to help them through that trauma. The Healing Brain helps people understand it can take only ONE caring person to help a kid heal and grow. Q: What triggered the creation of the Health Brain Course? A: About half of the people staying at domestic violence shelters in Alberta are children. These kids have faced a lot of trauma, and our shelter members wanted their childcare staff to better understand the unique ways the children in their care needed support. So Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (ACWS) partnered with Dr. Dawne Clark of Mount Royal University’s Social Work Faculty. A decade ago we developed in-person curriculum and have since launched an online course, which we’ve seen 640 people register for. Q: ACWS has been offering in-person classes now for years, why the move online? A: A grant from the IODE allowed us to take our in-person training online. It means we can offer this training to many more people in a more standardized format. No longer restricted to shelter workers, the course is open to anyone who interacts with kids or parents. We’ve had lots of school districts take it, child care workers in non-shelter environments. And they are from all over Canada and even folks in the States. I was surprised to see that a childcare centre from the very small community I grew up in BC downloaded the course. Q: What’s next? A: We would like to create a Level 2 in near future, as well as a childcare playroom manual to support our member shelters’ best practices, so every shelter playroom has been designed to be trauma-informed and provide the best learning environment for the kids. Q: Why is this course so critical to preventing family violence? A: Research shows that kids who have experienced family violence are more likely to experience domestic violence when they are older and, in the absence of therapeutic support, sometimes to perpetrate it. This course trains caregivers to support kids to heal from their trauma. With the right relationships and supports, these kids can break the cycle of family violence and we think this is what family violence prevention is all about.
