What Does It Mean to be Trauma-Informed? Perspectives across Roles In CASA Organizations

Background and Purpose: Trauma-informed approaches have gained significant traction in child welfare settings, yet how these approaches are understood and enacted across organizational roles remains underexplored. Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) organizations present a unique context. They rely on volunteers who serve as direct mentors to foster youth, staff who supervise and support those volunteers, and board members who provide organizational oversight, thus creating meaningful variation in proximity to direct service with youth who have experienced trauma. Understanding how these groups conceptualize trauma-informed care, and where their perspectives converge or diverge, has important implications for organizational culture, training design, and volunteer support. Research questions guiding this study were: What do nonprofit board members, volunteers, and staff think are the key skills, training, or values associated with trauma-informed care? To what extent do perspectives differ across roles?

Methods: Participants were recruited from a network of CASA organizations serving foster youth in a large U.S. state. Survey data were collected over six weeks via a central organizing body representing over 80% (n = 36) of invited organizations. Of 527 survey respondents, 207 (39.3%) responded to the focal open-ended question: “What skills, training, or values do you associate with being trauma-informed?” Respondents included volunteers (n = 135, 65.2%), staff (n = 58, 28.0%), and board members (n = 14, 6.8%). The sample was predominantly female (81.2%) and White (78.3%), with high educational attainment and a wide range of organizational tenure. An inductive qualitative coding strategy was used, with double-coding limited to three codes per response. Interrater reliability was assessed on a randomly selected 10% of responses, yielding agreement of 88.2%. Emergent themes were examined with attention to role-based and other variations.

Results: Two overarching themes were identified. First, participants across roles described trauma-informed care as fundamentally interpersonal, emphasizing individual and relational skills—particularly empathy, active listening, nonjudgment, and psychological safety—as essential to working with youth who have experienced trauma. Content knowledge, including understanding trauma’s effects on brain development and behavior, was also valued. Training was referenced less frequently than skills and knowledge, and when mentioned, was often described as insufficient on its own. Second, participants identified a culture of care as necessary at all levels of a trauma-informed organization, recognizing that the organizational environment either enables or constrains trauma-informed practice. Role-based variation was notable: volunteers sought staff modeling of trauma-informed practice and expressed awareness of structural and historical dimensions of trauma; staff took a more structurally critical view, identifying gaps between stated commitments and operational realities; and board members tended toward values-oriented responses with less attention to structural gaps.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest that while shared values exist across organizational roles, translating those values into a trauma-informed organizational culture is uneven. Training alone is insufficient; organizations must attend to structural conditions, leadership practices, and role-specific support needs, including secondary trauma among volunteers and staff. These findings have implications for how CASA and similar volunteer-based child welfare organizations design training, implement organizational culture change, and support those closest to the work.