Mission Statement
The Trauma-Informed Campus (TIC) Workgroup, comprised of students, faculty, and staff at Temple University, is committed to cultivating a campus community that recognizes the impact of trauma and promotes safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, and belonging for all members of the Temple community. To advance this mission, the TIC workgroup promotes trauma-informed approaches across the university by reviewing programs, policies, and practices; supporting collaboration among campus partners, advising leadership; and fostering education awareness, and continuous improvement through research, evaluation, and other initiatives.
What is Trauma/ A Trauma Informed Approach?
The workgroup’s activities are grounded in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) framework for trauma informed care.
SAMHSA defines trauma as a resulting from events or circumstances that are experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that have lasting adverse effects on an individual’s functioning and well-being.
What are the six core principles that guide trauma informed systems?
- SAMHSA defines six core principles that guide trauma informed systems:
- Safety means creating environments in which individuals feel secure and respected.
- Trustworthiness and Transparency emphasizes clear communication from the organization to its constituents, whether it be in decision making or policies.
- Peer support emphasizes encouraging connection and healing through shared lived experiences.
- Collaboration and mutuality focuses on reducing any sort of power difference between students and faculty and administration. Instead, it prioritizes shared decision-making.
- Empowerment, voice, and choice prioritizes meaningful participation amongst students, which ensures that students also have opportunities to influence policies that affect them.
- Cultural, historical, and gender responsiveness requires institutions to acknowledge how historical and systemic inequities contribute to trauma. It then encourages them to implement policies and services that are inclusive and equity centered.
- Safety means creating environments in which individuals feel secure and respected.
Why is it important for higher ed to adopt a trauma-informed approach?
Students, faculty, and staff may have already experienced trauma before coming to higher education while others may experience trauma while studying or working in higher education. Trauma informed approaches recognize the widespread impact of trauma, avoid re-traumatization, and ensure the safety and support for all students, faculty, and staff.
Campus Counseling & Wellness Centers
Activities
The TIC Workgroup was established in Fall 2025 and remains an ongoing initiative. Below are activities of the workgroup to date.
- Priority Identification:
- The workgroup identified institutional priorities for advancing the trauma-informed campus using a modified Delphi process.
- Members generated and refined over 50 priority statements representing potential components of a trauma-informed campus. These priorities were then ranked using both frequency in the top 10 and weighted scoring.
- Items that appeared most frequently in the top ten priorities were training, accessibility, collaboration, and a shared campus wide approach to trauma informed care.
- The highest weighted item was “Trauma informed care is treated as a universal precaution – not solely for faculty/staff who experienced trauma.”
- The most heavily weighted items reflect systemwide, institutionally supported, and collaborative systems focused on implementation.
- These priorities were used to guide the workgroup’s environmental scan.
- Environmental Scan:
- Utilizing the priorities established, the workgroup split into subgroups to conduct an environmental scan of the campus’ current trauma-informed practices.
- Each subgroup focused on an element of the Oregon Model designed by Trauma Informed Oregon. Priorities were organized by Oregon Model element.
- The five elements of the Oregon Model are listed below:
- Organizational Commitment is demonstrated through dedicated support for a trauma-informed infrastructure that includes specific funding and employee time for implementing a trauma-informed approach.
- Culture and Climate is the embodiment of all that is seen, heard, done, and experienced in spaces and settings.
- Training and Education: The professional development plan for all staff is demonstrated by staff competency and skill, as well as how the principles and values of trauma-informed care are applied in the training methodology.
- Policy, Procedure, and Practice Review: Policies and procedures offer a mechanism to sustain TIC, allowing helpful practices to evolve over time in response to feedback and growing knowledge about the field.
- Feeback and Quality Assurance: The organization demonstrates inclusive and effective feedback practices that solicit how staff and service recipients feel and experience the organization.
- The subgroups conducted outreach to various departments across the university to gather relevant insight into current practices.
- Responses from stakeholders will be consolidated to provide a comprehensive assessment of trauma-informed practices across the institution.
Acknowledgement of Provost Fundng
The TIC Workgroup would like to acknowledge the Temple University Office of the Provost for their funding and continued support for this initiative.
