The local site in the Illinois Project LAUNCH grant model is an example of a community using the Intervening Model as a tool to support their strategic planning and their approach to service delivery. Illinois was awarded a Project LAUNCH grant in 2010. As a result of engaging parents early in the service delivery model selection process, they learned of widespread trauma among members of the community that was impacting the mental well-being of young children in their families. They turned to the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE) to understand the trauma impact and then looked to the Intervening Model as a way to organizing their response to trauma to increase the mental well-being of their community. CM has been pleased to support IL Project LAUNCH with strategic planning at the state level, strengthening communication processes between state and local levels, and facilitating the engagement of state agency stakeholders in understanding and applying a public health approach.
Intervention Model as a tool for West Chicago in IL LAUNCH
As we started our work to support the strategic planning effort for the Illinois in their LAUNCH grant, we learned more about the ways in which the local site in West Chicago used the intervention model in the public health framework. After learning more about community wide trauma and the resulting depression from the families of youth child, they gathered together a diverse group of both providers and community members who in some way supported young children in their work. They asked each person how they saw their work fitting in the promoting, preventing, treating, and reclaiming categories. As a result, people saw themselves as partners in supporting children’s mental health. Clinicians began to see their work as beyond the treatment category.
