Clinical Services

Project Hope

Community Connections is pleased to announce its latest grant award from SAMHSA. Project Hope is a two year services grant to serve adolescent girls ages 12-18 in public and charter schools in Washington, DC who have histories of violent victimization, including physical, sexual or emotional abuse, and/or witnessing violence.

Community Connections and the DC Department of Mental Health (DMH) will work together first to develop a coalition that will make decisions about the direction and implementation of the project. The coalition members will include a youth advisory council, parent groups, school administrators, teachers and counselors, and several local social service agencies.

On the systems level, the project aims to 1) increase the understanding of trauma, its impact, and the recovery process among youth, parents, school staff, and clinicians; 2) facilitate the identification and referral of girls with histories of violent victimization for mental health services; 3) minimize barriers for girls to participate in services; 4) reduce the possibility of inadvertent retraumatization of survivors by the educational and human service systems; and 5) train DMH clinicians working in schools to use a time-limited manualized group intervention for adolescent girls with histories of violent victimization.

On the individual level, the project will serve between 120-150 girls by offering a new trauma recovery-focused group intervention called Love and Life: The G-TREM Model. This is a 16 session group whose goals are to 1) enhance key trauma recovery and coping skills such as self-protection, self-soothing, emotional modulation, maintaining interpersonal boundaries, and developing relational mutuality; 2) decrease risk of revictimization; and 3) strengthen girls' overall functioning. These groups will be offered in a number of local public and charter schools and other convenient local social service agencies, and will be co-led by female clinician pairs from the Department of Mental Health and Community Connections.

Love and Life: The G-TREM Model is based on the Trauma Recovery and Empowerment (TREM) model for adult women, which was originally developed at Community Connections and studied during the 5 year SAMHSA Women with Co-Occurring Disorders and Violence Multi-Site Study.

For more information about the project or to participate in the coalition, contact Rebecca Wolfson Berley, MSW, Project Hope Coordinator, at rwolfson@ccdc1.org or (202) 608-4735.