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SPECIAL
FEATURE:
Promising
Practices
for Refugee-Serving Programs
In this
third installment of our Sidebar Series on “Promising
Practices,” BRYCS highlights the National
Child Traumatic Stress Network’s work identifying
and developing interventions that work for addressing
trauma in refugee children, youth, and their families.
With
54 agencies located across the United States currently
in its network, the NCTSN first determined the data
required in order to know more about the children
it serves. Network agencies are now collecting basic
demographic and trauma-related information on all
children, youth, and families served through their
NCTSN programs.
Read
more about NCTSN and their work and this month's
featured program from NCTSN, International
Family, Adolescent, and Children's Services (IFACES).
BRYCS
will continue to develop our “promising practices”
series in the coming months as we share the innovative
work being accomplished by programs serving refugee
children and their families throughout the United
States. Please be sure to visit BRYCS' Targeted
Resources for Program
Managers, where you will find a link to the
complete list of Program Descriptions in the Clearinghouse.
This list includes additional programs that address
holistic health and community collaborations.
If
you have a program to share, or are aware of any
creative efforts towards enhancing services for
refugee children, please contact BRYCS with the
details. We want to recognize and profile these
efforts, so that others can learn from them. We
are also interested in hearing from you about what
tools, resources or mechanisms that you would like
to learn more about. Email
clearinghouse at brycs.org or call 202-541-3232
to speak with our Outreach and Information Coordinator.
You may also submit
your program using our Web form. |
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SUGGEST
A
CLEARINGHOUSE
RESOURCE
The BRYCS
project is acquiring and centralizing resources concerning refugee
children, youth, and families. We are interested
in print and non-print resources, Promising Practices,
descriptions of programs for refugee youth and children,
and other resources of interest to the refugee-serving
community.
The resources
we collect and present through the Clearinghouse are
often accompanied by descriptions from BRYCS, and
include, when available, the full text on the BRYCS
website. BRYCS will continue to update the clearinghouse
as new materials are acquired, reviewed, and included.
Please join
us in making this possible by suggesting relevant
resources. Click on the “Suggest a Resource” link on the
BRYCS homepage, or call toll-free 1-888-572-6500—press
#3 after the prompt. Or send an e-mail to Outreach
& Information Coordinator at
clearinghouse at brycs.org. |
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| Bridging Refugee Youth and Children’s
Services (BRYCS) is a national technical assistance
project working to broaden the scope of information and collaboration
among service providers - in order to strengthen services to
refugee youth, children and their families. Read more about our mission and services.
Who is a refugee? |
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SEPTEMBER 2005 SPOTLIGHT |
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The NCTSN: Raising the Standard of Care for Traumatized
Children and Their Families
This
month, BRYCS continues its focus on health and mental
health in refugee children and their families (see
last month’s Spotlight
on holistic health) by highlighting the work
of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN).
[1]
The
National Child Traumatic Stress Network
In
2001, in recognition of the impact of traumatic
events on the nation's children and youth, the U.S.
Congress passed the Donald J. Cohen National Child
Traumatic Stress Initiative establishing the National
Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN). Under
the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration (SAMHSA), the NCTSN now
encompasses 54 centers around the United States,
overseen by the National Center for Child Traumatic
Stress (NCCTS) at UCLA and Duke University. The
NCTSN mission is to raise the standard of care and
improve access to services for traumatized children,
their families, and communities throughout the United
States. The NCTSN has organized several task forces
staffed by member agencies that focus on special
issues, such as child welfare, service integration,
and refugees. This month's Spotlight
and Sidebar
highlight the work of those NCTSN members serving
refugee children and their families. [2]
This month's
featured search highlights resources that address
trauma issues for refugee youth and children.
Last month's spotlight highlighting refugee
health and wellness is available in the BRYCS
archive. The accompanying
featured search is available through the BRYCS
archive, along with past resource lists.
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1
Much of the information and text for this Spotlight
is drawn from a recent article in Dialogue 3-17-05,
a SAMSHA publication, reprinted here with permission
of the primary author, Judy Holland, of the National
Center for Child Traumatic Stress. This article is
now available on the SAMHSA DTAC Web site:
http://www.mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/dtac
See the list of NCTSN
centers serving refugee children and their families.
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WHAT'S
NEW |
Focus on Research
from The Urban Institute
The Urban
Institute, a nonprofit nonpartisan research institute,
examines social, economic and governance problems
within the United States as a means of educating the
private and public sectors, as well as the citizenry,
on the policies meant to address these challenges.
The Institute focuses on 14 areas of research, including
Child
Welfare and Immigration
Studies, and has developed a number of publications
pertaining to refugees,
asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants. In
July 2005, Institute experts Randy Capps and Rob Geen
presented at the Annie E. Casey Foundation's "Consultative
Session on Immigrant and Refugee Issues in Child Welfare"
and are making their presentation, "The
Demography of U.S. Children of Immigrants"
(including refugee children and the implications of
these demographic data on child welfare), available
through the BRYCS Web site. In addition, “Promise
or Peril: Immigrants, LEP Students and the No Child
Left Behind Act”, available from the Foundation
for Child Development website, contains the preliminary
findings and observations of a multi-year study of
the No Child Left Behind Act and its potential impact
on the education of children in immigrant and refugee
families. Keep checking the “Research of Record”
and “Latest Reports” sections of the
Urban Institute's Web for upcoming reports on
ongoing research about immigrant and refugee families
and child welfare. |
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Research & Data Available
The Annie E.
Casey Foundation’s, 2005
KIDS COUNT Data Book, is a national and state-by-state
effort to track the status of children in the U.S. The entire
report is available online with enhanced interactive features,
which allow you to create custom graphs, maps, ranked lists,
and state-by-state profiles; or, download the entire data
set as delimited text files.
The 2004
Global Refugee Trends Report is available from UNHCR.
This report provides an overview of refugee populations,
new arrivals, durable solutions, asylum-seekers, stateless
and other persons of concern to UNHCR.
"Implementation
of the Parents as Teachers Program with Hmong Mothers and
Children" This paper presented by, Steven A. Gelb,
PhD and Mary Jo Clark, PhD, RN is the result of a two-year
pilot study of the use of the Parents As Teachers (PAT)
parent education program with Hmong mothers and their children
between birth and three years of age. Although the PAT model
is widely used, this study describes the first attempt anywhere
to adapt the PAT to an exclusively Hmong population.
Child
Welfare
Service
Array in Child Welfare: The National Resource Center
for Organizational Improvement offers a process and a set
of guides that child welfare agencies can use, in conjunction
with community collaboratives, to assess and enhance their
service array.
Kinship
Care Legal Handbook: This handbook from the University
of South Florida School of Social Work Florida Kinship Center,
is the result of an effort to provide information about
legal issues and services available to people who are caring
for the children of relatives.
Health
notices
The CDC has
published recommendations for presumptive treatment of schistosomiasis
and strongyloidiasis among the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan
and other Sudanese refugees. Read the full report here.
COMING
SOON:
The new BRYCS resource, “RAISING CHILDREN IN A NEW
COUNTRY: A Toolkit for Working with Newcomer Parents”
will be available for free download in October, in conjunction
with our Family Strengthening Spotlight. BRYCS is pleased
to announce that we are also offering this toolkit on CD
Rom. If you are interested in receiving this BRYCS resource
(available after September 15th), please contact the BRYCS
Outreach & Information Coordinator, Jen Rose, via our
toll-free number 1-888-572-6500 -- press #3 after the prompt
-- or by e-mail: clearinghouse@brycs.org. |
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