Community and Care Building; Cheyenne County

We are working to build resilience and bring community wellbeing to Cheyenne County by supporting the schools to be better able to meet the emotional, social, and behavioral needs of the students, so they can learn better.  Our goal is to bring trauma awareness to our community through education, support, and awareness.  As the number of childhood trauma's increase, there is a corresponding rise in addiction, learning issues, suicide, smoking, chronic disease, poverty and early death.  The schools are struggling with teaching the kids as there are so many social factors that the kids are dealing with that they aren't free to learn.  Thus we want to wrap around the schools and community in order to provide supportive and caring adult relationships, which is the proven way to overcome and heal these traumas.

1.  Purchase curriculum desired by the teachers to help the kids with emotional struggles.  

2.  Support youth programming which addresses social isolation and provides opportunities for caring adults to wrap around the kids, to buffer the traumatic events they are or have experienced.

3.  Work with Wichita State University this summer to transition the clinic and county health to trauma aware processes and policies to support mental wellness in our clinic settings.

All agencies in the community are reporting increased social needs and struggles (mental health, learning issues, addiction, risk of suicide, isolation, poverty).  By bringing awareness and intervening earlier we can help heal the hurt hearts and brains to diminish the potential lifelong impacts that we do not have the capacity to help in Cheyenne County.