In 2019, the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence (JHFE) awarded the Bounce Coalition a grant to provide training and support to three of Louisville’s adolescent residential services over a two-year period. Since then, Bounce has partnered with Seven Counties’ Bellewood and Brooklawn, Boys and Girls Haven, St. Joseph Children’s Home, and the on-campus Jefferson County Public Schools serving these agencies to become self-sustaining, trauma-informed organizations – serving children and families through healing-centered, trauma-informed policies and practices.

Throughout the past year and a half, Bounce has provided a number of training and technical assistance opportunities to the partner agencies in an effort to support them as they continue their journey to becoming trauma-informed organizations for both their youth and staff.

  • The Bounce University train-the-trainer model teaches participants to train on our foundation curricula, Bounce 101: Intro to ACEs and Trauma-Informed Practices and Bounce 102: Building Resilience. This model helps to create sustainability within the agencies so that once this grant work is over and Bounce is no longer working as closely with these organizations, they can continue to train new staff around these principles.
    • Since January 2020, we have trained 25 participants that are now Certified Bounce Trainers who will continue to receive support and professional development opportunities from Bounce even after the grant work is done.
    • Agency trainers have trained 157 staff at the agencies in Bounce 101 and Bounce 102 and have also trained 14 foster parents thus far.
    • There is one final Bounce University training scheduled before the end of the year to further build out each organizations’ bench of trainers.
  • In addition to standard pre- and post-test evaluation for each training, Bounce also provided each agency with an Organizational Readiness Assessment, which surveys high-level leaders of the organization on a number of dimensions that measure organizational change towards a trauma-informed approach. To assess youth’s peer interactions, relationships with staff, sense of safety, and sense of belonging, Bounce administered Culture and Climate Surveys to the youth in each organization and are currently facilitating focus groups with a sample of youth in each agency.
    • Based on this data, each organization had the opportunity to engage in action planning around the strengths and areas of growth identified through the survey.
    • Both surveys will be administered again towards the end of the grant work to assess organizational progress.
  • We have also held a number of Bounce Learning Collaboratives, which allows the Certified Bounce Trainers and leaders at each organization to come together to support one another, share best practices, and learn in a collaborative way.
    • So far, we’ve had 2 Bounce Learning Collaboratives with 34 attendees and have two additional learning collaboratives scheduled for later this year.
  • Lifting up youth voice during this project is an important commitment throughout this work. We have done this by training peer supports, young adults that were formerly in the foster care system, to become Certified Bounce Trainers and utilized their expertise and experiences to train staff at the agencies.
    • These same peer trainers will also be training the youth at each site in self-care strategies and practice and will be helping out with the focus groups. All peer trainers are compensated for their time and talents as they work with the agencies.

As a result of this project, Seven Counties’ Bellewood and Brooklawn, Boys and Girls Haven, and St. Joseph Children’s Home will have established evidence-based trauma-informed care models and staff training that support the transformation of Kentucky’s child welfare system.

Learn more about the Bounce Coalition’s trainings at bouncecoalition.org/trainings/.