Brave Voices | Hospital Based Trauma Informed Care for Youth and Families
Program Overview
Brave Voices is a hospital-based violence intervention program at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. We provide culturally relevant and trauma-informed care coordination and referrals to community-based services for children and their families who are victims of violence. The Project Brave team, staffed by two full-time clinical social workers, engages patients with violence-related injuries and their families within 72 hours of first being seen at the Lurie Children’s Emergency Department, Inpatient Unit, and/or Outpatient Clinic. In addition, the HVIP works with a planning team of six community partners, and parent and youth leaders, to assist with the design and implementation of the program.
Vision
Brave Voices at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago envisions a safer, more resilient Chicago where children, families and communities are empowered through meaningful, community-based support that promotes healing, positive development, and intergenerational success. By breaking cycles of violence, we will create a future where all youth and families can thrive in safe, healthy, and supportive environments.
Mission
Brave Voices at Lurie Children’s Hospital is dedicated to building a comprehensive system of support where children and youth exposed to violence can heal, recover, and thrive within their homes and communities. Through holistic, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed care coordination, we provide youth survivors of violence and their families with the necessary resources to foster resilience, improve mental and physical well-being, and promote long-term healing.
Core Values
Our work is rooted in our love for children and youth. We recognize that children’s exposure to violence during critical times in childhood and adolescent development presents unique needs and interventions that are different from adults. We aim to provide a nurturing and safe space where a young person is seen and heard without judgement. This transparent and open communication builds genuine trust between youth and our care team as they partner in shared decision making regarding the patient’s care. We believe in a strengths-based approach, focusing on youth’s strengths and assets, to goal planning for holistic healing and recovery and reestablishing safety. We believe patients are the experts of their lived experiences and the owners of their narratives. It is the brave voices of survivors that lead to their healing and transformation. We understand that when a child sustains a violent injury, the impact is felt across the family unit. This is why our focus is not just on the patient, but also on supporting the family members who are exposed to and impacted by violence. We aim to not only help patients and families return to “normal” after their traumatic experience, but to flourish. It is our hope that they receive transformative services that ignite hope, self-efficacy, and resiliency.
We believe that providing trauma-informed care for pediatric patients with violent injuries is crucial to mitigating the cycle of violence and supporting long-term restoration. Children assessed for violent trauma have long been discharged from the emergency department directly back to the same environments where they sustained their violent injuries with few interventions geared towards promoting safety and wellbeing within their living environments. This sobering reality underscores the need for connecting child survivors of violence and their families with supportive, evidence and strengths-based programs and services within their communities to reduce injury recidivism, repeat hospitalization and other systems involvement. Our violence recovery services (VRS) team provides psychoeducation to help families understand, own, and normalize their emotional responses to violent trauma and injury. The VRS team assists children and families in finding healthy coping strategies so that they recognize the power of the choice they have in responding to their experiences.
We believe that fostering meaningful connections is key to impactful and efficient delivery of care. We understand that we are stronger together – whether it is strengthening family cohesiveness, connecting children and families to community-based services, strengthening our clinical and community collaborations, or breaking down silos between organizations within communities – our success is interdependent. We aim to strengthen the connection of families with services and supports located where they live, learn, work, and play. Our goal is to ensure families feel supported to grow and develop in their communities. To accomplish this, we understand it is critically important that our clinical team build strong connections with our community partners to ensure timely, coordinated access to comprehensive services that are available when families need them. Together, we work to identify services gaps, measure efficacy of current interventions and develop new interventions to continuously improve program quality and to mitigate the effects of trauma on children and families. We promote collective care and prioritize capacity-building among providers to encourage personal and professional development of our direct service workers.
For Youth and Families
Our VRS team is deeply committed to each patient and family, desiring to exceed patient expectations in helping families navigate systems and overcome barriers to receiving care and services. We understand that many of our patients and families are deeply impacted by social drivers of health (e.g., housing, nutrition, and income instability) that serve as the root cause of violent outcomes. Our team is uncompromising in our efforts to partner with families to provide tailored support that addresses their specific needs. We are committed to walking with families through every step of the process.
For Healing-Centered Systems
We cannot truly end the cycle of violence in our city without acknowledging and addressing the historical disinvestments in the black and brown communities that shoulder much of the impact of violence. We believe that we must identify systemic barriers to recovery and then advocate for policy changes to reduce those barriers. Our advocacy extends across various sectors including education, healthcare, juvenile justice, disability equity and inclusion, social services and child protective services. We strongly advocate for preventative measures and early intervention to address the root causes of violence that young people experience to decrease risk factors for future trauma and violence and improve the future quality of life of our youth and society.
We envision a safer Chicago where children, families and communities are free of violence. Through our work, we seek to redirect investments to prevention efforts through cost-savings associated with reducing the number of children and youth admitted into the hospital with violent injuries. By disrupting negative social drivers of health, we aim to create positive effects that impact families for generations to come.