Some state workers are on their way to providing more sensitive care through Hawaiʻi's first trauma-informed care certification program.
The Learning and Leadership Collaborative, under the state’s Office of Wellness and Resilience, is a step toward making Hawaiʻi a trauma-informed state — a goal established by Gov. Josh Green in a 2024 executive order.
It will be available to state workers who want to learn more about how childhood emotions, grief, and other early-life events can show up in adulthood, specifically in the workplace.
Tia Roberts Hartsock, the program’s primary trainer and the OWR director, said that educating more people on the impacts of childhood trauma will boost the state’s overall resilience and wellness.
“We need to be able to engage appropriately, to understand what it means in our lives today, and how it shows up in really great ways and strengths, but also in ways that might not necessarily be helpful,” Hartsock said. “So how do we do that in a way that acknowledges the past, and then also understand it comprehensively and be able to provide the best service we can?”
The Learning and Leadership Collaborative is an eight-module hybrid program that is half online on the Department of Human Resources Development’s website and half in-person with lectures and workshops hosted by the OWR.
The program is in its soft-launch phase, with roughly 200 state workers enrolled in the first phase. It will officially open to all state workers in January, but Hartsock hopes it will eventually expand to workers at the county and nonprofit level who wish to participate.
She noted that this type of training is heavily shaped by place, culture, and lifestyle, noting that much of the content is Hawaiʻi-specific.
“Specifically with Native Hawaiian culture, we've got so many values that drive the way in which we kind of show up every day as residents here,” Hartsock said. “So this has been really informed by historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, and the epigenetics of trauma, and how they have a really strong place here that we need to acknowledge, to understand, and we need to train on that.”
