One Reading Children and Young People’s Partnership had their first Trauma Informed Network meeting in June this year.  Lots of people from the partnership attended making the meeting full of interesting thoughts and ideas. The first meeting sought to establish whether partners thought a network was a good idea and, if yes, what would partners like to see the network provide.

It was a resounding “yes” to a network! 😊 Most partners wanted to see a sharing of trauma informed (TI)  knowledge and practice as the primary task of the network. Then there were a few themes. A refresh on the NES Trauma training would be helpful, as would more time thinking how to use the “taking a TI lens to your organisation” across an organisation. The network was also thought to be a good way of developing how partners worked together supporting our families who use more than one of our helping services.

We took time to reflect on where partners had travelled on their TI journey since the Conference in 2020. Many felt they were still at early stages but had continued to have discussions with teams and were starting to formulate plans. All reflected that the impositions from Covid-19 had necessitated a focus on here and now which had stalled a few TI plans.

Excellent suggestions were generated as to how the One Reading Children and Young People’s Partnership Board could help. In addition to the Board having signed off on the definition of trauma and resilience, supporting completion of the NES Informed and Skilled level trainings will greatly help develop the shared understanding/language we all need when talking about trauma. More conversations across levels within organisation would be welcome, as would ensuring we include people with lived experience in service design and delivery.

The organisation of future network meetings currently sits with the Consistent Approaches to Emotional Wellbeing. This group will meet soon after a welcome summer break so will consider the feedback in more depth then. We didn’t manage to secure volunteers to run a second network meeting on this day, but if you are interested please email us on OneReading@brighterfuturesforchildren.org.