Projects

The Child Abuse Training and Technical Assistance Centers provide training and technical assistance to child advocacy centers; multi-disciplinary interview centers or teams; and child abuse prevention, intervention and treatment service providers. CIR Staff have been working on the CATTA projects for over 12 years and are considered experts in child abuse training in California.

Since 1999, the California Child Abduction Task Force, along with CIR, has presented trainings throughout California. These trainings have reached thousands of participants, primarily professionals who are first responders to reports of child abduction. Services provided by this project include a two-day multidisciplinary response to child abduction training, a full-day child abduction simulation event, and other advanced topic training and resources.

The Initial Child Interview Training (ICIT) aims to train first responders on best protocols for gathering information in a child abuse case, thus minimizing trauma to the child and avoiding multiple interviews. The training is broken up into three modules: 1. Law Enforcement, 2. CPS, and 3. Mandated Reporters. Each module is approximately 2 hours long, and contains interactive activities and knowledge checkpoints throughout. The course is free and available online 24/7.

VITAL is an effort to study and promote the science of relational health and the importance of supportive relationships for the health and well-being of children, and families. Our purpose is to use the science of relational health and promote its practice among those who work with child well-being in order to prevent Adverse Childhood Experiences, mitigate the impact of toxic stress, and improve child health outcomes.

The California Trauma Informed Care Academy (CalTICA) is a free online course that provides a baseline on the neurobiology of trauma and best trauma-informed practices for multidisciplinary professionals. It is available 24/7 and contains three core modules, plus additional discipline-specific modules.

It is crucial that survivors of all ages, racial groups, gender identities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and cultures have access to in-depth, trauma-informed services. Serving California's Diversity Training Project helps service providers be better prepared to address the needs of critically underserved victim groups. The Diversity Project focuses on responding to the needs of three specific populations: People of Color (POC), People with Limited English Proficiency (LEP), and Immigrant Populations.

Service providers need to be aware of and responsive to the multi-dimensional needs of survivors and work to directly address any barriers to service. The Underserved Populations Training Project focuses on four distinct survivor populations: survivors with disabilities, male survivors, LGBTQ survivors, and foster youth survivors. The project provides free training and technical assistance to victim service providers in order to increase their ability to effectively serve underserved survivors in the four identified population groups.

CIR is working with the Greater Bay Area Child Abuse Prevention Council Coalition to implement the Enough Abuse Campaign throughout the 10 Bay Area Counties of Northern California and beyond. Please visit the Greater Bay Area Child Abuse Prevention Council Coalition website for more information on how we are implementing the project. Visit the National Enough Abuse website for more information about the national campaign.

The Center for Missing and Abducted Children's Organizations (CMACO) was a membership organization dedicated to providing support to non-profits who serve families and communities of missing, abducted and exploited children. The goal of CMACO was to provide a platform for communication and collaboration between these organizations.

To further the goals of the Children’s Justice Act, the CJA Task Force recommended the funding of a Statewide Coordinator for Multi-disciplinary Teams in California. The primary focus of this program effort was to fund and support the work of one part-time consultant to serve as a single point of contact for technical assistance requests from established and emerging Multi-disciplinary Teams and Children's Advocacy Centers in California. To learn more about this project please contact Kris.Murphey@cirinc.org.