A year after Laneita Williamson, RN, joined CareNet as its Traumainformed Care Manager, she is engaged in a statewide effort to put more knowledge about such care before the public and providers.

Williamson is one of the architects of the Resilient North Carolina project, which now has a substantial website that offers a trove of resources. The website and project operate with the idea of making the state a place where people thrive, and the state to be healing-centered.

She speaks enthusiastically about the website, https://resilientnorthcarolina.org/.

“The goal is there are so many pieces of information and national sites, that if you’re new to traumainformed care, you really don’t know where to go,” says Williamson, a nurse for more than 20 years who recognized the importance of needing to use mindful approaches for patients with trauma. “So we are pushing this out so that those folks who are in non-profits or in the community or like us, if they want to go to one source that lists all of the sites and resources that’s been validated by us, this is the place to go.”

In addition, she says, the goal is to help the growing number of people in the state with traumainformed care certification to be able to spread the word about the website and continue to bring such training and care throughout North Carolina.

The project is funded by the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust and supported by 11 key partners, including the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist and CareNet Counseling. Williamson credited Mebane Boyd, Resilient Communities Officer at the N.C. Partnership for Children, with helping spearhead the project. The two women have worked closely with each other and with an ad hoc committee regularly for 18 months to get the website off the ground.

This is the second website project Williamson has helped to grow. Last year, she led creation of an intranet page within Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist that also lists the guiding principles of traumainformed care and allows people access training that would help them be certified in such care. Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist also recently launched a full trauma-informed care program: https://intranet.wakehealth.edu/news/wf2023/07/jam-we-all-need-to-be-traumainformed

The new statewide website can be a useful resource for CareNet employees—therapists and administrators—Williamson says, because it offers so much useful information for training, team meetings or to take to conferences.

By using educational tools on the website, CareNet’s non-therapeutic staff may gain more holistic understanding of trauma, Williamson says, which will help them in their approach to, for example, clients who might be calling in distress.

“As far as counselors, when you have a client that is at the point in their journey where really needing to know a little bit more and are open to finding out how trauma has impacted them on different levels and how to move through things, this is a great website that they can really use,” she says.

“This website helps to validates them. Did you know that 60 to 70% of the population has had some type of trauma as children? The website talks about brain development, signs and symptoms. You can pull pages up to print out and hand over to patient just so that they know it. I think every counselor will be able to use it differently based upon what types of clients they’re seeing.”