Trauma-Informed Design Consultants
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About
Creating Empowering Environments
Our physical environment can impact our emotions and behaviors, both negatively and positively. They have the ability to increase or reduce our stress. The spaces in which we live and receive services can communicate safety and promote supportive relationships, or they can symbolize lack of dignity and agency, encouraging re-traumatization. At Trauma-informed Design Consultants, we work with organizations to create spaces that identify and mitigate potential triggers, and reduce stress levels.
Recent Highlights
Develop Higher Education TiD Evaluation Tool
Collaborating with Wrexham University to Adapt Tool for Primary and Secondary Schools
Connections for Abused Women and their Children (CAWC) provides a shelter for adults and children, counseling, advocacy, and a 24-hour hotline for people affected by domestic violence. We partnered with Canopy / architecture + design to provide a trauma-informed lens to CAWC's new location for their administrative offices and transitional residences.
Worked with a senior class as they created a 23,000 square foot, 3-story property for youth who were trafficked. The final project included both program and residential space, and focused on mitigating potential triggers, maximizing comfort, and centralizing choice. In order to realize how the environment could affect identity, worth and dignity, and promote empowerment, the class had to first understand the dynamics of human trafficking.
This initiative is a pivotal element of Wrexham University's Trauma and ACE (TrACE) aware project and will build on the Trauma-informed Design Society's work of creating a similar, Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Certification of Research Excellence (CORE) award-winning tool for primary and secondary schools, known as the Trauma-informed Design Evaluation Tool for K-12 Schools (TiDEvalK12).