The City funded CU Trauma and Resiliency Initiative (CU TRI) with $60,000 in COVID Relief funds to initiate trauma response and crime prevention programs. Thus far CU TRI has recruited a total of 12 individuals who have agreed to attend the training and play an active role in their “Healing Neighborhoods” project. They identified 2 youth Peer Ambassadors, 2 community responders, 4 Wisdom Leaders and 4 Community Navigators. They will host another recruitment effort in June/July and hope to be fully staffed this summer.
Training began on March 28th and will continue until May 3rd. Topics covered included models on COVID, trauma, psychological first aid, crisis response, marketing and messaging and the best practices to address community violence. During each training session, the participants work on assignments to apply the concepts learned. They have had conversations with their social networks about COVID (designed to reduce vaccine hesitancy) and applied some of the basic principles of Psychological First Aid within their social networks. CU TRI anticipates 75 individuals will be served with this COVID Relief funding and will promote resiliency and strengthen the availability of resources to help families recover from trauma and adversity.