Welcome to the Resilience Leadership and Learning Institute

The Resilience Leadership and Learning Institute has a strong commitment to equipping organizations, staff and communities with family strengthening, child abuse prevention strategies and approaches. Our belief is that too often services are delivered and provided to families in a manner that serves as a barrier to engagement. Most trainings provide education about theory. Trainings are often information dissemination sessions that are about the children and families that will be the recipients of services. We believe there is a missing prerequisite piece that would help unlock the daily operationalization of the training information that is learned by participants. Service providers need a strong foundation in an understanding of the effects of trauma, an understanding of self and more meaningful empathy training before they are able to establish relationships with children and families that are authentically grounded in strength-based theory. They also need more than just theory – providers need specific everyday actions outlined as part of the training. They need an opportunity to problem solve real life situations they encounter by examining what they can do to reduce family stress while strengthening parenting skills.

 

Please find here some of our current offerings. All trainings can be tailored to meet the professional development needs of your organization. We look forward to partnering with you!

 

Bringing the Protective Factors to life in Your Work

This 2-day, 7-module training was developed by the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance. The training takes participants on a deeper dive into each of the Protective Factors identified by the Center for the Study of Social Policy. Only trainers certified by the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance are eligible to present this curriculum.

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Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), Resilience and Your Role in Strengthening Families

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As knowledge and understanding around the Adverse Childhood Experience Study grows, so does the need for tangible action steps to build resilience. To do this, we all must recognize that we have the opportunity and shared responsibility to build resilience of children and families. This 90-minute training begins with a brief review of the ACE Study, discusses the importance of intentional resilience strengthening and engages participants in perspective shift work to equip them with every day action steps that are grounded in the Protective Factors Framework.

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Early Healthy Relationships

This multi-modal training focuses on supporting the development of healthy relationships and secure attachments – the prerequisites for healthy sexual development. As this training is designed for infant and toddler providers, the majority of the training targets the actions of caregivers and the interactions with infants and toddlers – how those actions and interactions affect healthy relationship development. The training strives to shift the perspective of caregivers to help deepen an understanding of respectful relationships with the children in their care and takes time to build skills in this area. “What does that look like? How do I do that?” The training also emphasizes the importance of using the correct names for all body parts and includes exercises and activities to lessen the discomfort of participants in naming all body parts.

 

Understanding the Sexual Development of Young Children

Physical and emotional attachment between parent/caregiver and child can be the early foundation for physical intimacy that develops in later maturation. This relationship acts as expectation setting for all future relationships. This session provides participants with a review of the components of building strong foundations in healthy relationships for children and provides an understanding of child development, specifically related to sexual development: “What behaviors should I expect to see?” This training also provides participants an opportunity to identify behaviors that should cause concern and/or warrant intervention.

 

Supporting Healthy Organizational Culture: Leading with Emotional Intelligence

How do organizations develop and maintain a healthy work culture?  All organizations have periods when staff relationships can be challenging.  This can be a result of perceived inequities, changes to personnel policies and just the daily stressors of large workloads. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), “toxic culture in the workplace is 10 times more meaningful than compensation when an employee decides to leave their job."

 

This session is designed for leadership and staff to ground everyone in the fundamental principles for creating and maintaining psychologically safe and healthy work environments and be designed to unlock skill building for how ALL staff do that.  It begins with us, as individuals.  We need to strengthen our own resilience building skills before we can contribute authentically to strengthening the resilience of others. Healthy organizational culture also requires skill building for all of us in healthy, respectful communications. The session discusses essential components for engaging in constructive conversations that are difficult.

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Building Resilience in Yourself and Others: Practical Strategies

Take a deeper dive into the science of primary prevention of abuse and neglect.  Participants will build their skills by gaining a deeper understanding of the science of primary prevention and the initiatives that prevent abuse and neglect from ever occurring. Discussion will encompass how to effectively apply theory and  work toward strengthening our protective factors tool kit to better serve our community. 

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Building Resilience: Trauma, Hope and Organizational Culture

Participants will gain knowledge about the skills and actions required to strengthen the protective factors of the children and families they work with. This session also provides a foundation in the science behind hope, recognizing that hope is an active process that differs from optimism. Participants will gain knowledge of the actions required to have hope and the opportunities to teach young children the skills necessary for hope. This session provides information about ACEs, the science of epigenetics and the importance of intentional resilience building in all children.

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Trauma-Informed Organizations:  Skills and Actions Required of Leadership

This is a three-part training curriculum to build and strengthen leaders at the community level in order to ground communities in an authentic perspective shift that will result in changes in the service delivery of prevention services for child abuse and neglect.  This curriculum consists of three parts: Introduction to the Protective Factors Framework; Becoming a Protective Factor-Responsive Organization; Skills and Actions Required of Leadership. This training is most effective when followed by consultation and coaching.

 

RLLI works to change the service delivery of programs that support children and families that will result in an increase in cooperative family engagement.  We cannot continue to tell families, “You need to do better.” We cannot continue to tell providers, “You need to do better.” We must focus intentional effort on building the capacity and skill sets of both populations.