Taking preventive measures to best protect the Five Acres children who live in the agency’s care, their staff and other clinicians, Five Acres is postponing our scheduled 7th Annual Clinical Conference on March 19 to a later date.

Five Acres 7^th Annual Clinical Conference is to be held at the Courtyard Marriott in Monrovia, CA on March 19th, 2020 from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Led by Dr. Rachel McClements, Chief Operating Officer for Five Acres, the clinical conference is intended for mental health providers who work with children in a variety of settings.

This year’s conference focuses on: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Care Spanning Multiple Disciplines.

The purpose of the training is to teach professionals, spanning multiple disciplines, basic knowledge, values, and skills for working with children and youth in the child welfare system who have experienced traumatic events.  This training will enhance the worker’s understanding of the neuroscience of the impact of trauma on the brain, behavior of children and adolescents and help them use this knowledge to support children’s safety, permanency and well-being through trauma-informed practice.  Guidelines for recognizing dysregulation and intervening directly in a trauma-sensitive therapeutic manner will be presented.  Training will include therapeutic examples, exercises, role play, hands on tools, as well as methods for enhancing regulation daily.

At this training you will learn:

1. To understand the relationship between a child’s lifetime trauma history and his or her behaviors and responses and will be able to recognize how child traumatic stress is exacerbated by ongoing stressors in a child/youth’s environment and within the child welfare system (including separation from/loss of caregivers, out-of-home placement).
2. To define psychological safety and understand its importance and will be able to identify coping responses, strengths, and protective factors that promote resilience among children/youth who have been impacted by trauma.
3. To practice trauma-informed strategies to effectively engage with children/youth who have been traumatized.
4. To appreciate how important it is incorporate the essential elements of a trauma-informed practice into their everyday work.
5. The importance of psychological safety for children/youth as well as the importance of knowing and implementing protective factors to promote resilience for children/youth who have been impacted by trauma.
6. To appreciate the various ways trauma victims are dysregulated and remain at higher risk for additional dysregulation by stressors in the environment and system, and promote interventions which lessen and/or mitigate these stressors by using trauma-informed child welfare strategies and referring the child/youth for trauma informed assessment and treatment.

Speaker: Jeanette Yoffe, MA, MFT., earned her Masters in Clinical Psychology, specializing in children, from Antioch University. She treats children with serious psychological problems secondary to histories of abuse, neglect, and /or multiple placements. She has specialized for the past 16 years in the treatment of children who manifest serious deficits in their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral development. Her desire to become a child therapist with a special focus on adopted and foster care issues derived from her own experience of being adopted and moving through the foster care system.

Continuing Education Credit: Up to 6 credits are available for PSY, MFT and LCSW.

Five Acres is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Five Acres maintains responsibility for this program and its content. The California Board of Behavioral Science (BBS) now recognizes APA continuing education credit for license renewal for LCSWs and MFTs.

Registrations are open.