The New York State Office of Children and Family Services awarded a $4.5 million grant to the BCTR’s Residential Child Care Project to provide crisis intervention, de-escalation and restraint training and coaching to trainers who work with residential child care organizations in New York State.
The grant supports a program called Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI), which uses trauma-informed strategies to anticipate and de-escalate disruptive behavior, manage aggression and help children and young people living in residential care learn social and emotional skills. In addition, the grant will provide funds to re-certify trainers and provide technical assistance and assessments to residential organizations.
Martha Holden
“This money provides us with about 20 percent of our operating budget and allows us to provide much needed training and support for agencies in our home state, which is very important to us,” said Martha Holden, project director for the Residential Child Care Project (RCCP), which translates current research into programs that are designed to improve the quality of care for children in group care settings, schools, juvenile justice programs, foster care, adoptive families and community-based programs.
TCI has been in use for four decades and is currently used approximately 2,000 residential child care facilities, foster care settings, juvenile justice programs, hospitals and schools worldwide.
The program uses social science research along with an assessment of each organization’s structure and culture to improve residential care staff members’ ability to respond therapeutically to the feelings and behavior of a child who is in a crisis.
It does this by addressing six areas: leadership and program support; child and family inclusion; clinical participation; supervision and post crisis response; training; and documentation, incident monitoring and feedback.
You can learn more about the Residential Child Care Project at http://rccp.cornell.edu/.
