Hi, everybody. I am really happy to be here with you. Thank you to Nori and to Steve, who do amazing work in the Trip Center. So thank you so much. I am here with my team. I'm actually going to introduce them in a little bit. And I do need to tell you the entire team are alums. So I'm so of my team who are all alums of the School of Social work. So today, I'm going to talk about from clinician to community engaged translational scholar. And I'm going to talk about how we're going to we're building social and mental health programs for children families and those who serve them. Mostly those who serve them today, but you can't serve children. You can't make a difference in the lives of children unless you take care of the workforce. The workforce is incredibly important. And unless the workforce is healthy and engaged and regulated, neurologically regulated, they can't take good care of kids and families. So that's kind of what we're going to talk about today. There we go. The first thing I want to do is express gratitude. You know, It takes a family, a university and professional mentors to raise a clinician. But it takes an entire academic village to raise a scholar. It takes people like Sue Hyatt and Colmer Tata to teach me how to do this kind of work who, you know, took me from a baby scholar. So thank you to you. I see you here out of the corner of my eye. I'm also, of course, grateful to my family and to my professors, but I am most thankful to Mike Patner and Tamara Davis, who were both deans who supported my work. And I am especially grateful to Charles Banz whom has supported my work not only through the Bans community fellowship, but every time I see him, he's so interested in my work and just pushes me along and says, Keep going, keep going, keep going. So I am especially blessed to have come in contact with and been supported by doctor Banz. I am blessed by everyone's faith in me and my work. Also, thanks to, I'm going to use the new term, I UI, and the School of Social work, all of my colleagues who form the teams in which I work, Team science is essential to doing this work. This is not a loan work. This is teamwork. So I just wanted to talk for a minute about who I am as a clinician and a scholar, and then I'm going to introduce my team. So even though I'm only 29, I'm actually a 40 year social work clinician, and I happen to be a scholar. So I started out as a clinician? I still think like a clinician. There's always that one patient client child who stays with you and makes you want to learn it all so that what happened to them never happens again. That's what forces me. That's what forces a lot of us to continue to do this work and to try to do it better. For me, this is the genesis of prevention and intervention work. I will always, always be a clinician first. So I think as a clinician and act as a clinician. My research follows from that premise. So I went to fast forward because, you know, I was clinician for a lot of years. I taught at another school for a lot of years, but I want to fast forward all those years, and a couple of babies later who are now adults to my orientation to faculty at I UPI. Again, doctor Banz was Chancellor at the time, and he asked us all to ponder, we were hired. And what was our fit within the faculty here? Mine was so incredibly clear. It was like it was in, you know, a Marquee head lights. I am a clinician who can translate trauma responsive mental health practices to community agencies, especially those serving children. It remains as true today as it was then. It is who I am, and it's still the work that I do. So I want to take you through a few of our projects that were community engaged, trauma response of projects that led to the project that we're going to talk about today. Back when I first came to the school, some people reached out to the School of Social work for help with how do we set up trauma programming? And that happened to be the En Martin Christian Community Center. And so we started doing work in Martindale Brightwood. And then from that work, we my partner, Wanda Thruston, and I got the dance fellow. And so one project leads to another project, leads to another project, leads to another project. So Martin Dale Brightwood, Trauma responsive. This is a picture here of a team working together. We always work in teams, which led to the bans fellowship at Indi Met Indi Met High School. Unfortunately, that project was underway, and then we had COVID. So that was a problem for finishing the project. But they continued on, and they did develop some good trauma responsive programming for the high school students that they work with at Indy Matt. That project led to Wanda and I. You can see us in the picture with our community engaged team and the Doc student at the time, who just became a mommy, by the way. And so that was our Trauma responsive schools project, and that was with Washington Township Schools. So Wanda and I were able to work with the workforce. We had we built champions. This was our kind of kickoff event, the picture that you're seeing here. Again, we were able to do some of the work in COVID hit. So we were able to pivot to actually study school personnel during COVID to see how they were doing. And we launched a survey in the Indianapolis area with all the schools, all the school personnel, in the greater Indianapolis area. And in one week, we had 1,300 surveys returned. So school personnel really wanted to tell us how they were doing. So that project really led us to some very interesting observations about teachers and resilience and how do we do this work and how do we do this work better. Once COVID started to lift some and the kids were back to school, we were able to still use some of our Robert Wood Johnson money with a project called Gins for Success. And we worked with the school resource officers to help them to become trauma responsive, to work with kids that were at risk, particularly African American male students that were at risk of failing or dropping out. And they paid particular attention to those kids, put them in a group called ich and that morphed into another music therapy project. So this everybody wants to make sure that they're doing a good job for kids in schools. So these projects just morph into one thing or another. All around Trauma responsive programming. The common threads in my research agenda are it's always team science. It's always community engaged, and it's always agency based. The M clinician hat is always on. It's always implementation science. We use learning circles and a design team approach. Our funding started out with $50,000 with the Martindale Brightwood project and the Bans project. Went to almost $1,000,000 with the Robert Wood Johnson project, and our new project is now 5.7 million. So you can morph your research over time into larger and larger studies that have more reach. So for scholars out there, that's one way to do that. It's always about mental health trauma, focusing on how we care for kids and adolescents and those who serve them mostly in the school setting. So the current project is Mental Health Service Professional. It's a Federal Department of Education Grant. It's over five years. I'm going to introduce my team in a minute. But we also have three community partners, Metropolitan School District Pike. Tippi Canoe School Corporation, Lafayette School Corporation. We're also partnering with a research national research partner, the Research Triangle Institute in Durham in the Research Triangle. We are working to provide fellowships to MSW students. We are providing national training, not only for our students, but those people in the school districts that are working in mental health and trauma response programming and the use of multi tiered systems of support. We are always using learning circles with our kids, and we're going to be starting it with our agency instructors and offering CEUs to them as well. The goals of the project are to increase the capacity of high need low income school districts to provide mental health services for children and youth in their districts to educate and graduate. School based social workers in evidence based trauma responsive approaches, teaching children and youth who can be hired than in high needs school districts. We want to improve their retention, and we want to increase the number of licensed school social workers in Indiana. We do have licensure in Indiana. Our students get licensed at the first level, the LSW level, and then they get endorsed by the Department of Education as school social workers. So, I want you to meet the team. I don't know if he sang is here. If you are on the team, I'm going to call your name and please un mute and say hi. So if he sang is here, mute and say hi, I don't know if you are. Meghan Alric is the Director of Mental Health Services for Tippy Canoe School Corporation. I know she's here. Hello. And Krissy Ray Bennett is the Doc student on the project, who is our project project manager. Hello. And Jake Ressler is our data manager. He's also a PhD student. Valutations. Karen Blessinger, is our field coordinator. Good afternoon. And Kyle Waki instructor and designer for our online school courses, and he's a license specialist. Hi, everyone. All right. So you met the team. There is somebody else here that I really, really need to say, Hi to, and that is Monica Reef. Monica is our behind the scenes grant manager in the School of Social work, who has been working with me almost night and day to make sure that we're staying on the right side of the law with Aura and also the Feds. So thank you, Monica. I love you. Thank you. Um All right, so we're going to engage in a discussion here about community engaged implementation of our project. So one of the things that I think is really important is that as the team is engaged, our interest and our enthusiasm helps to engage our community. So so far, team, what has this experience been like for you? You can just mute and talk. It's been really exciting for me, you know? So I had spent ten years working as a school social worker as well. And then now I'm teaching school social work courses. And so to kind of see the way that it's connected itself, you know, that we're able to provide all this additional training through these learning circles. It's just really exciting, especially when we have gotten back some of the data. That's just showing how many students that we've reached when, as Barbara was saying, you know, there's so many mental health deserts and so many kids not being served. It's just really exciting to kind of see that this is, you know, Project that's, like, really touching kids' lives. And I don't know. It's been fun to kind of see how it's grown. One of the things Kyle said that I want to just jump in on only 31% of the state of Indiana is adequately served for mental health care, and that's even worse for children, by the way. So we really do live in I mean, in Indianapolis, we have better services than, you know, Tippy Canoe County and some of the other places. So it's really important that everybody understands that we do live in a very underserved state. So, anybody else want to talk about what the experience has been like for you? I would say it's been eye opening for me. It's been an interesting learning experience, coming from the disaster background, and just seeing how much unexpected overlap there is. You know, when you're looking at, you know, disaster preparedness and mitigation, there's a lot that's going on in the schools that actually touches on very similar concepts. And I didn't expect that. It's been really interesting. Mm hm. Appreciate coming for, go on. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I was going to add from the school perspective, it's very encouraging to have an opportunity where just even in my experience in starting out in social work, having mental health services in the school in the beginning of my career was a luxury. Now it's a necessity. And there's been since the pandemic, some just feelings of fear and panic of how are we going to serve all these kids that need services, and to have this opportunity where we can collaborate and bring these services in through an opportunity like this is bring some hope and reassurance that we're going to be able to serve the kids because we see it. You know, it used to be that we're here to answer your academic needs, and we have school nurses, and if a physical issue happens while you're here, we're going to address that, but as you all know, we can't separate it, and we need to address their mental health needs while they're at school. We just the resources have been slim. So this is encouraging. Thanks, Megan. And Megan is also a field instructor for the School of Social Work and also in Aum. So I think it's important to recognize that Megan has remained in close contact with the IU School of Social Work over time. And the picture that you're seeing here is Megan and her team. We were at a conference last week. And so the teams got together and had lunch, so which was lovely, actually for everybody to be together in one space, sharing a meal. So Sharing food is really important to community engaged work for sure. Anybody else want to talk about the experience so far? I mean, we're in. We're not even finished year one yet. Coming from a clinical perspective as well as I was a school social worker for a couple of years and I provide mental health services to schools. Coming from that perspective, I am so excited to be able to build the capacities and create prevention work at all three levels of services and expanding it. It's a true passion, and to see it really go out with the learning circles and better prepare our MSW students with clinical perspectives and clinical practice with theories. It's so important and to see it just kind of click. It was amazing to see their eyes light up during our last learning circle of play therapy. They were just so eager and excited to learn about the new practice. So it's really encouraging. And the learning circles are key to how we do work. Not everybody that has a field placement at the IU School of Social work has learning circles or has agency based sort of organized educational opportunities. And we have decided that for 2 hours, twice a month, we're going to take some of their field time and give them some added information that they're going to need in the schools. And the people who are teaching those learning circles are actually their field instructors. So we're bringing their field instructors in and having them teach the practice that they're passionate about. So we've had Field instructors that have taught play therapy. We've had field instructors that have taught coregulation. One of the field instructors did our certification for suicide assessment. We've done mindfulness and maintaining their own wellness, which is really important in this kind of work. So the learning circles next year actually are going to be built out, and our field instructors are going to become part of the learning circle. And RTI is also going to be help us with more peer learning as well as continuing in the process that we have been doing so far. So it's a real sort of give and take where students our learners and their field instructors all become learners together. Sometimes the student is the teacher, sometimes the field instructor is the teacher. So it's I think a really nice model to bring to them so that they can take it onto the schools where they get jobs later on. I do want to talk about why this work is important because I really do believe that we all have that spark inside of us that keeps us doing this work. Social work is hard. School social work is really hard. Working with children is really hard. Why is this work important to you? Where's your spark? Anybody want to talk about that? I'll talk about. It's important to me, as a folk coordinator, I love the collaboration that we have ongoing with the field instructors through this process. It's not something as long as a lot of times the students are placed and everything's going well. We don't always have besides just a once a semester site visit or whatnot, that ongoing support and relationship building. And so not only for the relationship of the school with the community partners, but also with the students and to kind of track how they're doing and be involved in that process. But then finally, for the students that they're serving. I think it's just so important that the students in schools are supported in any way possible, and they're not only being supported by the school system now, but also our students, as well as this whole team behind them. Thank you, Karen. Anybody else want to talk about that? It's okay if you don't. I mean, that's a personal. It's definitely a personal thing. Well, it's important to me because during COVID, I worked as a clinician, and through certain situations, I got burnt out as a clinician. I didn't keep my wellness. I had some things happen in my family situation. Where my husband had cancer. And so those parts of me that got burnt out of providing therapy during COVID, I want to prevent that because everybody is going to have adversity as a social worker. Everybody's going to have those moments when your partner, it's so likely your partner may have cancer, right? And so being able to keep that wellness and well being and the supports and relationships that you have in place even through those diversities is so important to learn it now in your MSW program. Is vital for their success later on, I see. No, I'm conscious of time. I want to move on. I want to talk about the importance of this work to Indiana. Right now we're in three districts. Right now, we're actually only in one district because that's where we could recruit for. We are spreading next year to Tippi Canoe County and hopefully Lafayette. But we want to spread further as well. And does anybody on the team want to talk about why this is important to Indiana? So that we know the numbers are not good. African. For our youth. And you know, we can look at that as one of two ways. They've been through a great deal, and they unfortunately missed opportunities while we were all home alone of learning skills and learning how to cope with things, and we see those gaps, and we're going to see them for a long time. The flip side to that is we've been telling them, as we've hopefully been working on reducing stigma and telling them to tell us that they are telling us. So they're coming at us in droves, the numbers of kids that are struggling with anxiety and not necessarily even being able to To define it. You know, their mental health literacy is a struggle. And so not even being able to accurately define things, feelings, coping with feelings. So the literacy within their own vocabulary, the coping of what they're dealing with, and the numbers of what we see is overwhelming. So Indiana is not necessarily in a good place, but Indiana is in a really good spot for an opportunity to intervene right now. And so I feel like we are kind of experiencing a call to action, and that's what we need to respond to. Yeah, thanks, Megan. I want to ask you a question. How many social workers do you have and how many social workers do you need in your district? So our Pi in the sky, we have, I think, nine. We're a district of close to 14,000 kids, 16,000 staff. We have 20 buildings. What we would love to get to and we have 31 student services personnel. What we would love to have is a school social work school counselor team at every building. Our high schoolers have more just because of the numbers. So they have about a 350 to one, and we would love to have one plus social workers at each of those buildings. Right now, we have one social worker that goes between. So she has 5,500 to one social worker. And then our school buildings range from 300 kids to 800 kids. So it would be lovely if we had one in every building along with the school counselor, because what we have found is that having that team, they bring skills together that is ideal. So we would love to have 25 social workers. We have nine. Elf. Yeah, I think it's also very similar in one of our other districts. There's one district that we're working with that doesn't have any. We we have the potential to impact over 30,000 children with this with this project because of the schools and the districts that we're working with. It's important to Indiana because Indiana is part of the states in the country that definitely have mental health deserts, not being able to serve, like, we can serve a third of the state. That's two thirds of the state that we cannot adequately serve. Having services in schools cuts down barriers for families. Parents are stressed. They're working multiple jobs just to make ends meet. Then they're trying to get homework done, do all the things, and kids are stressed, not only in general, but post COVID for sure. So providing mental health in school removes not only physical barriers, but also just scheduling barriers. If we can put services in schools, children don't have to wait for services. Children who have to go out of the school to get services have to wait sometimes months. Months in the lives of children is like an eternity, particularly for kids that have depression and anxiety. They're not functioning in school, or if they have trauma related issues, they're not functioning in school. In order to function in school, you have to be functioning well from a mental health perspective and a wellness perspective, for sure. My last question to my team to our team is, what is the most challenging aspect of this work for you? And Monica, you can actually chime in, but because we've been having some grant management issues with money. But what's the most challenging aspect so far of the work on this grant for us? I'll go ahead and jump in. Go ahead. So one of the things that I think really is what's great about what we're doing, but I have seen some of these challenges is kind of that additional rigor that we have with our students, that, you know, we do have this additional training and this additional time. And that can be a little bit hd. But at the same time, I think it's so important because, you know, we've talked about how underserved our kids are. So we can at least know that When we are having graduates, they're coming out and they are ready to work in the field. They are professionalized and they know how to practice, right? So this additional rigor we're putting them through, I have to say, like, it is tough, though, because it's a balance of trying to teach them those skills, some of those self care techniques, and just well being and then try to make adjustments in our actual courses and how we do some of those things, so we can accommodate that and that we're listening to students, and that we are flexible with how we can while balancing, hey, we want to make sure that these kiddos that we're serving are getting the best possible service. From our graduates. So just that balance, I would say. But again, I think it's really, really important, so. We've also had stru some structural or bureaucratic challenges with grant management, trying to get contracts through, but also getting courses online because we want all of the schools courses online so that we can reach the entire state, So that all of all of our IU campuses across the state can have students that are in the school's focal area. So just trying to get those courses through all of the channels that they have to go through is also a bit of a challenge. Anything, Megan, from the school perspective that's been challenging so far? I think sometimes there's a misperception of what the work is, You know, the work is safety and its health. And sometimes there's fear over So there's misinformation out there, and unfortunately misinformation and fear spreads quickly. So, you know, the loudest voice will be heard until the credible voice speaks. So we have to make sure that we get out what exactly that we're doing. Unfortunately, I think sometimes we're so busy doing the work, we're not always able to always advocate for the work that we're doing. And so sometimes there are groups that question the motivation behind social emotional learning, those different things. And so sometimes we have to pause and explain, you know, we're working on safety and mental health, and we want to make sure that your child is safe and okay. And there's it's not anything other than that. So, the other thing that I learned from you is that we are educating brains and brains are growing. And the social emotional learning is really helping brains to grow. Yeah. So it's really important to reframe sometimes that work from we're not doing social emotional, you know, you know, soft skills. We are training brains. Yeah. It's brain science. It's brain science. Yeah. Yeah. Tier one work is all applied educational neuroscience. F. And those that that is not enough for and need that Tier two and Tier three work, its safety and its mental health. And and we can't separate that from your overall health, and we want you to be okay. R. Thanks. I'm going to move on because I know we are out of time. But there's one slide I really want to get to. This project is part of the bipartisan Safer Communities Act. That means that people in Congress from both sides of the aisle voted for this. I just want to bring that out. That's important because, you know, that just doesn't happen these days. The other thing is that I wanted to tell you our statistics so far. In one semester from the middle of August to the middle of December when our students were in school. We have 11 MSW students that are currently in our fellowship program. They served 3,356 students in Pike Township. They did 40 suicide assessments, over 200 referrals for community resources. They served 60 children in transition. That is those children that are homeless. And our MSW students have now been trained to carry and use the Lock zone. So there are people in multiple schools in Pike Township that carry the Lock zone now, not just the school the school nurse. So I think it's really important that we've already had a lot of impact. If you look at Pike Township, their census for the number of children is about 10,000. We've served a third of their kids already. In Pike Township. So I just wanted to get to that before we got to questions. And I'm going to make all the slides available to you obviously, but teamwork teamwork contributes to how we implement a program. When we first started, we did a little team assessment. And we all scored in the same quadrant, which is not really good when you're building a team. We're all creatives. So we had to figure out how to do who was going to do the work and who was going to keep us on task. And C Krissy had to leave, but Krissy was the one that was elected to be the project manager to keep us all on task because we are all very creative people. And implementation is about doing the work. So we all have to stay sort of working in different parts of the quadrants, and integrating the community into this has been really important for us, and we're going to be doing more community input and building the project, and RTI is going to help us with that as well. I'm going to open this up for questions and stop sharing. Is that okay, Steve? That's great. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for facilitating such an amazing discussion with your partners. And as if anybody has a comment, raise your hand, we'll call on you if you have a question. While you're thinking about that, there were a couple of thoughts that came to my mind, as you pointed out, Barb, I'm a social worker, and my particular area focuses before the kids get to school. And so a couple comments. One is what I have been playing with in how to frame this to other folks, legislators, policymakers is that the work that you're doing is really about workforce development. Mmm. Because you're helping people, you're helping kids to be able to manage their emotions and regulate and be able to participate in the workforce. And I don't know if you've all seen it, but I noticed in downtown Indianapolis, when I drove by yesterday that on the side of the building, it says, Indiana estate that works. So we value work. And I think as you were describing it, the work that you're doing is really help is helping our students get ready to be part of the workforce. So that up. The other thing I would notice, I would take away is, Kyle, you mentioned that there's a lot of there's some extra rigor in the curriculum. But the result of that is, as you said, that students graduate and they're ready to work. And that's one of the things we hear from the community is the importance of having students graduate and be ready to enter the workforce. So I think you're on the right track, and it sounds wonderful that you've got a great opportunity where you're meeting with community and figuring out what that looks like. So it's informed. So the that you're doing in the instructional side is informed by what's needed in the community because of those partnerships. So that's only good for everything and where that goes from there and how to describe that. I also want to say because of Kyle's work with the license the school licensure, we were able to build in all of the requirements necessary, like, making sure that the students are certified in suicide assessment, making sure they get their CPR training ahead of time. So everything they will have everything ready for licensure at the school level, so they can get hired by August in a school. So we're hoping and we're hoping that we So one of the barriers, I do want to say this, the enrollment Cliff is a big deal, and we do have um fewer students in the school of social work to pull from. So recruitment is an issue. So if anybody knows a BSW that wants an MSW, this is the time to do it because we have great full fellowships for those students. Also, if they're practicing in the community, but they want to come back and they want to be school social workers or school mental health workers, this is the time to do it because we can pay the full second year. Awesome. Yeah, and I was just going to jump in with that to bar little advertisement. Please if you do have any students, whether they're, you know, first year masters or BSW, send them my way. I'm happy to talk to them about licensure kind of what that process might look like for them and why it would be important to take those schools classes. So yes, please. Right. And across the state, the courses are all online. And that grant helped us do that. Well, I hope you've been able to see some of the kudos in the chat. Just people recognizing what this work at every level, and under your leadership, Barb, from the school perspective. So thank you for what you're doing. We do want to pause here at this moment and thank everybody for coming. We know that some people need to hop off and get ready for their 1:00 or their top of the hour appointments. So just a reminder of thanking Barb and the team for their work, but also stay in touch with us at the Center for translating research and the Practice. Join us again next month. Come and see our other activities, follow us on social media, et cetera. We will hang around here though for a few minutes, ough if there are folks that still want to have an opportunity to ask a question or share something, we don't have to drop off right away, but we know others do, so we'll let you go and we'll thank you for coming and make that the official end as it were. So thank you so much.