Fostering Community Wellness Series: Addressing Toxic Stress and Adverse Community Events addresses toxic stress and community trauma. Designed for behavioral health providers, it offers guidelines for supporting resilience and promoting wellness in communities affected by adverse events. 

The series is composed of a fact sheet, webinar, and supplemental presentations: 

Webinar 

  1. Fostering Community Wellness: Addressing Toxic Stress and Adverse Community Events: This webinar explores the connection between social determinants of health, trauma, toxic stress, adverse community events, and mental illness. Presented by Crystal Lee Brandow, Ph.D., Reuben Cantu, and Richard Smith, M.A., and moderated by Jasmin Brandow, M.A., the webinar identifies five key social determinants of health impacting mental health: economic stability, education, social and community context, health and health care, and neighborhood and the built environment. It discusses how negative determinants, such as poverty, social exclusion, and lack of quality health care, exacerbate trauma and toxic stress, particularly in disadvantaged communities. The webinar argues that health inequities are the result of policies and practices across these determinants and calls for multi-sector efforts to reduce trauma and promote equity. 

Fact Sheet 

  1. Fostering Community Wellness: Addressing Toxic Stress and Adverse Community Events – A Fact Sheet for Behavioral Health Providers: This fact sheet provides definitions and background information on stress, trauma, and community trauma. It emphasizes the importance of culturally responsive practices. It outlines the following three tactics for supporting community resilience: 
    1. Culturally Responsive Practices: Establish secure community connections and support systems, and identify positive opportunities for connecting with others. 
    2. Recognizing Strengths and Resiliency: Empower individuals to develop strategies and tools for coping with traumatic stress. 
    3. Encouraging Community Action: Help individuals develop supportive connections and recover through community involvement. 

These tactics are designed to help mitigate the adverse effects of traumatic community events and negative social determinants, promoting recovery at both individual and community levels. 

Presentations 

Exploring the Impacts of Community Trauma and Toxic Stress on Our Well-Being: This presentation outlines how common factors in low-income communities can negatively impact residents’ well-being. It highlights how wellness-first, public health, and trauma-informed approaches can improve community-wide mental health and quality of life. The presentation emphasizes that wellness is a social justice issue, as mental health challenges and chronic diseases disproportionately affect marginalized communities. 

Adverse Community Experiences: Connecting ZIP Code to Mental Health: This presentation connects a person’s lived environment to their well-being, showing how neighborhoods profoundly impact residents’ physical and mental health. It highlights how negative social determinants of health, such as poverty and poor education, increase the likelihood of adverse community experiences and trauma, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color. The presentation calls for public health professionals to recognize and address adverse community experiences to enhance public health. 

Citation 

Program to Achieve Wellness. (2018). Fostering community wellness series: Addressing toxic stress and adverse community events. https://www.prainc.com/resource-library/ 

This resource was first shared in 2018. 

(PDF, 158 KB, Presentation, YouTube)