Adversity, Trauma and Resilience Knowledge Exchange 2024 - changing hearts, mind and systems

Around 200 people joined our Adversity, Trauma and Resilience Knowledge Exchange 2024 run jointly with the West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Partnership from Tuesday 5 to Thursday 7 March.

Changing hearts, mind and systems was the theme for our fourth Knowledge Exchange, our annual event bringing partners together with a common aim of helping to strengthen community resilience, build real change and improve lives.

The first two days were held online with the audience submitting questions and comments for our panels. Day three was an in-person event with over 60 delegates joining to hear about how the journey to be trauma informed is taking shape.

The journey so far

Activities carried out since our last Knowledge Exchange include commissioning insight reports, delivering trauma-informed training to thousands of multi-agency professionals, a West Yorkshire Charter and readiness checklist and appointing 17 Adversity, Trauma and Resilience Fellows as part of our Improving Population Health Fellowship class of 2024.

Sessions looked at how we work collaboratively with all our places and how we work across different geographies to embed a trauma informed and responsive approach and reduce traumatisation across our partnership. Throughout the three days, attendees were challenged not to be fearful about doing things differently, to discuss the art of the possible and that small projects can lead to wholesale change. Fellows from the class of 2023 shared their project findings covering trauma informed communications, asking if zero tolerance can be trauma aware and the messiness of being humans.

We heard personal accounts of the struggles in adulthood to overcome a childhood where violence, poverty, neglect and lack of care and nurture was common place and the harms which can be caused by social and other online media. Projects looked at building enabling environments, including creative writing for therapeutic purposes, embedding social love in services and policies, trauma informed workforce practices and multidisciplinary teams, seeking safety and achieving belonging as an antidote to trauma.

What's next?

Now we are focusing on delivery for the next year prioritising evaluation and intelligence and asking the question -  how do we know we are making a difference? We’ve teamed up with our evaluation partner Rocket Science to look at our results and consider to what extent we are meeting our ambition for West Yorkshire to be trauma informed by 2030. Understanding that life experiences can be the root cause of poor health is integral to building trauma informed services. Developing our training offer across the Partnership, including launching a train the trainer programme, and much more are in the pipeline. 

For a snapshot of some of the work we’ve been carrying out and a taster of what’s to come see our day 3 video round-up and video teaser. For the full line up and more information about the speakers see the event website.  Catch up with all the recordings and the presentations from the event on our digital hub.

Have a look at our illustrations from the event for an overview of presentations and speakers.