Description

Join us for our next Wednesday Wisdom session on June 26th, 2024 at noon, as we welcome Chris Warland, Workforce Development Program Director at the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund.

The experience of trauma is common--up to 60% of working-age adults self-report having had traumatic experiences. People who have experienced multiple traumatic experiences tend to struggle with employment. Normal human responses to trauma can manifest at work and result in lost productivity, absences, and separation from employment. The experience of poverty, itself a form of chronic trauma, presents special complex challenges to individuals seeking to improve their economic prospects. The principles of trauma-informed care, developed for social service settings, can be adapted and applied by employers in order to support worker wellbeing and improve workplace outcomes. In this talk, we will provide an overview of how responses to trauma and scarcity can manifest at work, review the principles of trauma-informed care, and discuss the ways in which employers can build awareness, respond appropriately to trauma, and avoid re-traumatizing workers.

Chris Warland has over 20 years of experience in the field of workforce development, specializing in programmatic and systems-level employment interventions for people facing barriers to employment such as homelessness and prior incarceration. He has worked across the country as a trainer, consultant, and subject matter expert for community-based organizations, national organizations, municipal and state governments, and federal agencies. His areas of expertise include transitional and subsidized employment, public systems coordination, and embedding employment programming within community violence interventions. Much of Chris’s work has focused on making workforce initiatives and employment opportunities more accommodating for people who have experienced trauma, through program design, systems change, and policy advocacy. Chris holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in social service administration from the University of Chicago.

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