St. Joseph County Public Library

St. Joseph County Public Library in Indiana will partner with United Way to address trauma and mental health in its community. The library will train staff to engage with the Self-Healing Communities model, which builds capacity in communities to generate new cultural norms and improve the health and wellbeing of future generations, and the Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs model, which helps recognize and address the results of childhood trauma, to create new public programming addressing mental and physical health. This programming will support community members as they recover from the collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic and build their resiliency. The library also will engage in a project evaluation to create a framework for integrating this work into future programming strategies and expanding it to other organizational areas.