This month, the National Institutes of Health awarded a grant to pilot a new program designed to help READI staff and participants continue to build resiliency and transform difficult experiences into positive change.
Through this grant, Professor Judith Moskowitz of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine will develop and test pilot the FOREST (Fostering Optimal Regulation of Emotion to prevent Secondary Trauma) program. Moskowitz worked with READI front-line staff to practice positive emotion skill-building, which incorporated staff feedback that better tailors FOREST to support people in communities with high levels of exposure to racial injustice, gun violence, and other forms of trauma.
“We’ve found that rates of stress and burnout are very high in front-line violence prevention workers,” Moskowitz said. “In order to do their jobs, they need support for coping with stress. As opposed to other programs I’ve worked on, this is very much READI staff telling us what they need and helping us see ways that our science can have more impact.”
Based on the established link between stress, negative emotions, and physical health, FOREST will build on Moskowitz’s previous work developing front-line READI staff as Positive Emotion Ambassadors (PEAs). This cohort of staff trained in positive emotion skills bring these skills to the READI program for the long-term.
