Family and Staff Support: Promoting Staff Wellness

Family and Staff Support: Promoting Staff Wellness

Berta Velilla: Teachers and home visitors see children of other families, that we're caring for, that have experienced high levels of trauma.

Robin Gersten: We see many more children with behavioral challenges than we've seen in the past. Children who have difficulty just functioning in a larger group, following directions, playing with peers. It makes for a difficult environment to want to come back to. 

Dave Bigda: Yeah, occasionally we'll get from staff that this is not what I signed up for, and that's an honest reaction. We all love the kids and the families, and we're trying to do the best we can, but there is a great frustration. We're seeing more and more children with these challenging behaviors.

Toscha Blalock: Our staff, who are the people who are equipped and ready to deal with it for the families that they serve, they might be dealing with it themselves. Over 40 percent of our staff are former Head Start parents. We have some staff that are caring for grandchildren because of their sons or daughters are kind of dealing with the addiction. On top of that, we even had one of our teachers that last summer passed away from an overdose. So, at a very close and personal level.

Rosemarie Halt: How do you protect your staff, how do you keep your families safe and deal with that stress is an everyday thought process. When you have a team that works in such a multi-faceted organization, with families that have such significant needs, you really have to be thoughtful about how you support the team that's doing it. And the way we approach that in our agency is just to have a variety of support systems that we wrap around our team. 

Margie Chastain: Right now, we do a few different things. We have what we call case conferences.

Toscha: And that is specifically designed to talk about your most difficult or complicated or stressful cases on your case load. The families that you just need more ideas about, or you need more support with and you can talk to a group of your peers managed by a licensed social worker who can give you that support that you need, who can do that complex problem solving that you, might need to do. Or just let you vent if that's what you need. 

Margie: Another thing that I started doing is mindfulness sessions with staff. So, I try and offer those on a monthly basis at a few of our sites. Even people who weren't familiar with mindfulness before, once they try it, they do really enjoy it.

Toscha: We make sure that our staff have monthly supervision with their supervisor one-on-one, private. 

Jamilah Miller: I'm able to go to my supervisor, I'm able to go to other advocates. So, definitely when I have a challenge, I don't keep it to myself. I always share it with others because I feel like that's the best way, the right way to approach it. 

Dave: We've helped do child development classes with them to get them certified and continue their education and support them. Head Start's wonderful because we have that technical training and assistance money that we can use to do that. 

Rosemarie: We're very big on trauma-informed care here, and so being up to date on that and making sure that we remember that the staff needs trauma-informed care as well as our children and parents.