Trauma-informed approaches are not new to youth-serving organizations. Positive youth development provides a pretty clear foundation to support youth and many programs are taking it to the next level by adopting Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s more encompassing vision of healing-centered engagement. 

The first step to a successful application of trauma-informed practice is grounding oneself. Understand how you are feeling, what your triggers are, and how you can respond so you do not transfer your anxieties or heaviness to the staff or young people you’re working with. Once you’ve grounded yourself, explore these 5 trauma-informed practices from Development without Limits that can be done via video conference. Find the full blog post on the Development without Limits website.

1) Set community agreements.

Creating a sense of safety and belonging is important in a healing-centered space—even if it’s a virtual space. Invite your participants to create community agreements as “a way we all agree to interact and be when we’re together.” When working with youth, you can do this as a dialogue, with a piece of chart paper on the wall behind you, through the chat function or through a collaborative tool like Jamboard.

2) Keep a routine.

Unknowns and things outside of our control can add unnecessary anxiety and stress to participants. You can minimize that by setting a predictable routine for each session. That means having a clear and consistent schedule with the same start time and end time each day. It also means repeating structures in your agenda each day. While the activities you do will be different, the structures should be the same for each engagement. For example, your session agenda might look like:

• Welcome/Check-In
• Physical Activity/Game
• Learning Challenge
• Groupwork
• Wrap-Up/Check-Out

3) Warmly welcome each person by name.

Dale Carnegie said, “Remember, that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” It’s true. Yes, it takes a little extra time, but for many of your youth participants, the time they are on Zoom with you may be the only time they interact with a caring adult and caring peers that day. 

Spend time supporting your positive, trusting relationships with youth. 

4) Guide a mindfulness time.

Part of healing-centered work is actually teaching young people how to re-set, refocus and find calm. When the external world is filled with unpredictability, we can help young people find stability within themselves. That starts with (you guessed it, see above) being grounded ourselves. Then, you can facilitate a meditation or mindfulness time during your sessions with youth. You do not need to be a yoga teacher to do this. Yes, it may feel awkward the first time you do it, but you’ll get used to it just like you’ve gotten used to teaching via Zoom.

5) Encourage young people to dream and imagine. 

In our programs, young people can play, reimagine, design and envision. We need to have space to do that virtually, too. For example, invite some silliness in to your virtual meeting time. Try fun activities like:

• Charades
• Drum circle with whatever “found instruments” are nearby 
• Freeze dance
• Kahoot! quiz game

For more details check out the full blog post on the Development without Limits website.