NEAR@Home: Advanced Training for Home Visitors to Talk About ACEs.
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EMPOWERING HOME VISITORS TO LEAN INTO SENSITIVE CONVERSATIONS
Home Visitors witness intimate challenges in their work with families - postpartum depression, domestic violence, substance use, poverty, and systemic issues. It can be difficult to lean into these topics with families for fear of causing harm or not knowing how to respond. Radical Nest helps home visitors lean into discomfort, navigate the unknown, and gain the courage to talk about the more difficult home visiting topics.
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LEARNING THROUGH A GUIDED, REFLECTIVE, IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
It’s not just a training. Home visitors will be guided through the felt experience and compassionate exploration of the full breadth of emotion, sensation, and nervous system activation that accompany difficult conversations. Home visitors will gain greater understanding of their own fight/flight/freeze responses and how these show up in the context of their work.
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INCREASING CONFIDENCE AND SATISFACTION TO DECREASE BURNOUT
Home visitors have reported increased confidence and satisfaction in their work by learning how to better support families with sensitive and difficult topics. Home visitors experience a weight being lifted from their shoulders when they realize they don’t have to be therapists to engage in powerful conversations. Burnout decreases when home visitors learn to recognize and attend to the way their own ACE history shows up in their work with families.
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WEAVING TRAUMA INFORMED PRACTICE WITH INFANT MENTAL HEALTH
The NEAR@Home Toolkit was developed by home visitors, for home visitors. It brings a whole-family oriented, Infant Mental Health lens to conversations around the impacts of intergenerational trauma and resilience. We weave extensive training around Polyvagal Theory, trauma, and reflective practice to gently guide your team through the material with deep reflection, parallel process, and conversation around culture and resilience.
When I was a home visitor, I remember feeling really nervous completing depression and relationship safety screening tools.
I was worried about how I would respond if a parent had a high score or indicated that they had suicidal thoughts or felt unsafe.
Many of the families I worked with had experienced significant trauma. This showed up in home visits through difficulty bonding with their child, missed visits, difficulty with follow-through, and going into “freeze” when their child cried. Sometimes I knew pieces of their story but I didn’t know what to do or how to help. The curriculum didn’t quite cut it and I wrestled with my own vicarious trauma, burnout, frustration, and hopelessness.
Enter NEAR@Home. This is a beautiful resource for home visitors to learn and trust their capacity to lean into these difficult topics without retraumatizing parents or “opening Pandora’s box.”
Home visitors will learn that “being” is a powerful way of “doing” and that we honor parents’ stories through spacious listening. Home visitors will find that resilience comes alive when we talk about trauma and that they can truly make a difference - not just in the lives of parents and children, but for generations to come.
Michelle was one of the original NEAR@Home Facilitators under the MIECHV Innovation Grant and has been guiding programs in learning NEAR@Home since 2017. She worked alongside five other facilitators to develop the process of training home visiting programs in utilizing the NEAR@Home Toolkit, in addition to revising the toolkit itself based on extensive feedback from home visitors.
Michelle co-authored an article on NEAR@Home for the World Association of Infant Mental Health (WAIMH):
NEAR@Home for Home Visitors: Addressing ACEs in Home Visiting by Asking, Listening, and Accepting.
Logistics
Due to the deeply reflective and sensitive nature of these conversations, NEAR@Home learning is through a cohort model of up to 15 participants.
Supervisors are required to attend with their team.
Training is spread over 7-8 months and includes the following:
STEP 1: GATHER
1-2 hours conversation with program supervisors/management to better understand the needs of the program, reflect together around goodness of fit, and discuss scheduling.
STEP 2: NURTURE
A half day “NEAR Refresh” training to review NEAR concepts and how these show up in home visits. This is also an opportunity to remember and explore the direct application of Trauma Informed Care principles and Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health.
STEP 3: FLEDGE
16 hours (spread over 2-3 days) of guided reflection using the NEAR@Home Toolkit, including conversations around why it’s important to talk about ACEs, preparing for sensitive conversations, cultural implications and adaptations, responding to parents, professional boundaries, hopefulness, and resilience.
STEP 4: FLY
6 months of ongoing team reflective consultation (1.5-2hrs/month) to support implementation of NEAR@Home learning.
6 months concurrent supervisor reflective consultation (1hr/month) to explore barriers and successes.
INVESTMENT
$200 initial consult call (applied to full cost)
$15,000 base price
$500 additional monthly consultation
add-on
PROGRAMS TRAINED
OREGON
Siskiyou Community Health Center:
Outreach & Healthy Families Program
Yamhill County Healthy Families
Yamhill County Head Start
A Family Place Relief Nursery
Families First Parent Resource Center
Jackson County Nurse Family Partnership
Lincoln County Nurse Home Visiting Programs
ILLINOIS
Cooperative Association for Special Education (CASE)
Helping Us Grow
Naperville 203 CUSD Early Connections
Early Childhood Developmental Enrichment Center & FIND
MICHIGAN
Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency, Inc.
PENNSYLVANIA
National Nurse-Led Care Consortium:
Mabel Morris & Nurse Family Partnership Programs
What others have said working with Michelle: