Maryam Kia-Keating of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School worked as part of the Project Team that has developed and published the Vicarious Trauma Toolkit (VTT). The VTT provides first responders – including fire, EMS, law enforcement and victim services organizations – evidence-informed tools to address the impact of vicarious trauma on their staff and volunteers.
The Toolkit features a Vicarious Trauma Organizational Readiness Guide (VT-ORG) and a Compendium of Resources. The VT-ORG is an assessment tool organizations can use that measures five areas of evidence-informed strengths of organizations that are healthy. One VT-ORG is available for each discipline (FIRE, EMS, LAW ENFORCEMENT, VICTIM SERVICES), for staff and/or leadership to fill out and assess the agency’s current capacity as a vicarious trauma-informed organization. The results can then be used to identify which areas have gaps and prioritize next steps to address them.
The Compendium of Resources contains nearly 500 tools that organizations can use to become more informed about vicarious trauma, including policies, research literature, training materials and links to websites, podcasts, and videos. The Compendium can be searched by organizational strategy, topic and discipline, so organizations can find appropriate tools for their agency and its needs.
Maryam Kia-Keating worked on the Project Team representing the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). In addition to ISTSS, other national partners included the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, the National Association of State EMS Officials, the National Center for Victims of Crime and the National Children’s Advocacy Center. Local partners were the Center for Violence Prevention & Recovery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. The project was funded by the Office for Victims of Crime which awarded the grant for this project to Northeastern University’s Institute on Urban Health Research and Practice.
Maryam Kia-Keating is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology in the UCSB Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology and a Licensed Clinical Psychologist. She holds degrees from Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and Boston University, and completed her clinical and post-doctoral training at the University of California, San Diego. She focuses her work around coping and resilience in the context of experiences of trauma, stress, and adversity, particularly for ethnic minority and other vulnerable and/or understudied populations including refugees and immigrants. She utilizes community-based participatory research methods to engage and empower communities towards social action and reducing health disparities.