Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak further address the importance of having a trauma-informed framework in organizations, agencies, and even in communities. Asking different questions that are trauma-sensitive can allow you to better interpret behaviors and empower individuals.
Key Points

SAMHSA identified trauma as resulting from an event, a series of events, or set of circumstances experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening with lasting adverse effects on the individual's functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.
Trauma-informed just means that your organization has a framework to understand that the people you serve may or may not be victims of some sort of trauma in the past.
With a trauma-informed approach and using asset-based development principles, we can give clients skills to become self-sufficient and empower them to live a more positive and resilient life.
Everybody can learn from trauma-informed care principles because we all have to start thinking about how we interpret behaviors and ask different questions to better our communities.

Resources

SAMHSA
American Institutes for Research (AIR)
Building a Trauma-Informed Organizations and Systems
130 - Dr. Becca Johnson - Trauma Sensitivity 
169 - Dr. Jodi Quas: Communicating with Child Victims 
200 - Trauma Healing Institute

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Transcript
Dave [00:00:00] You're listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, this is episode number 204, Is Your Organization Trauma-Informed and Why Should It Be?

Production Credits [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:31] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:37] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:39] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in human trafficking. Sandie, we've certainly mentioned the word trauma on the show before. Today we're going to dive in a lot more on what it means to be trauma-informed and why organizations should care about that. This is something that you've done a lot of thinking on yourself and then also with the partners, we've worked with, right?

Sandie [00:01:03] Yes. And over the last well since the semester ended, I've been to New York City, to the U.K. - five cities there, Washington D.C., and then took a team to Obera, Argentina. I had so many conversations with leaders, with organization leaders, government folks, and just sitting on the airplane talking to people, or in the airport waiting for your delayed flight to re-board. And over and over again trauma came up. It's a word that people are talking about. We've talked in the past about adverse childhood experiences, which are part of the trauma that informs how a child develops. So, I thought let's talk about it from more of a systems level. What about organizations and how they address preparing their staff to deal with people who have a past of trauma.

Dave [00:02:07] And I'm really curious of the folks you mentioned, where you've had those conversations on travel and with other partners and organizational leaders. What context is the word trauma coming up for them? What are you hearing?

Sandie [00:02:22] Well, a lot of frustration was what I was hearing. We rescue people and you know from previous podcasts I really try not to use the word rescue because you can recover someone and then it's a long healing process. And so many of my conversations were around "we rescued them and now ...