About
Fostering Informed and Responsive Systems for Trauma in Early Care and Education (FIRST:ECE) provides training and resources to build trauma-informed early care and education settings.
FIRST:ECE supports early care and education settings that serve children birth through five years of age by providing:
- training and support to early care and education programs in making trauma-informed organizational change;
- resources to support organizational change, build trauma knowledge and increase use of trauma-informed practices.
An initial pilot of FIRST:ECE produced promising evaluation results, with early care and education staff reporting increases in knowledge of trauma-related concepts, increased frequency of use of trauma-informed teaching strategies and progress toward broader organizational change (e.g. trauma-informed changes in organization policies and procedures). Download the report (PDF).
FIRST:ECE is a partnership between the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, the Psychiatric Research Institute, Arkansas State University, and other implementation partners.
