Principles of Trauma-Informed Care

POAH’s Designing Trauma Resilient Communities project utilizes The Missouri Model Principles of Trauma-Informed Care, which focuses on 5 key principles: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. According to the Missouri Model, the principles are defined in the following way: 

	Safety Ensure physical and emotional safety, recognizing and responding to how racial, ethnic, religious, gender or sexual identity may impact safety across the lifespan.
	Trustworthiness Foster genuine relationships and practices that build trust, making tasks clear, maintaining appropriate boundaries and creating norms for interaction that promote reconciliation and healing. Understand and respond to ways in which explicit and implicit power can affect the development of trusting relationships. This includes acknowledging and mitigating internal biases and recognizing the historic power of majority populations.
	Choice Maximize choice, addressing how privilege, power, and historic relationships impact both perceptions about and ability to act upon choice.
	Collaboration Honor transparency and self-determination, and seek to minimize the impact of the inherent power differential while maximizing collaboration and sharing responsibility for making meaningful decisions.
	Empowerment Encouraging self-efficacy, identifying strengths and building skills which leads to individual pathways for healing while recognizing and responding to the impact of historical trauma and oppression.