Trauma-informed colleges need systems, not just training

“The conversation about trauma-informed higher education has been operating mostly at one level — the level of individual practice and programming. Colleges are hiring counselors, running faculty workshops, adopting flexible attendance policies and encouraging compassionate classroom practices. These efforts matter, but they are not enough on their own to make a college trauma-informed at the institutional level. Workshops expire, programs get cut and classroom practices depend on individual faculty who may retire or leave. What the field has been slower to build is infrastructure: the coordinated, cross-divisional structure that does not depend on any single champion or disappear when priorities shift. Community colleges are in a unique position to lead this shift. Our open-access mission puts us in direct relationship with the students most likely to carry the effects of adversity into the classroom, and with the communities they come from and will serve. The move from trauma awareness to trauma-informed institutional capacity is a move community colleges are built to make. What infrastructure looks like Training is something a college offers. Infrastructure is something a college builds. The distinction matters because it determines whether trauma-informed practice becomes a lasting part of how the institution operates or remains programming that fades when attention moves elsewhere. At California’s Long Beach City College (LBCC), the organizing mechanism has been the Trauma-Informed Approach Workgroup: a cross-campus team with representation from Academic Affairs, Student Services, Human Resources, the Academic Senate, psychological services, basic needs and faculty from multiple disciplines. The workgroup is not an advisory body. It has coordinating authority, resource backing and a standing place on the institutional calendar. It sets direction and holds the work across divisions that, at most institutions, rarely sit at the same table. The workgroup gave structure to a commitment already in the college’s 2022 to 2026 strategic plan: to invest in trauma-informed training and resources for all employees. The strategic plan made the priority visible. The workgroup made it operational. What made it work Three elements moved the workgroup from coordinating committee to institutional infrastructure. The first was cross-divisional investment. Academic Affairs, Student Services and Human Resources each committed funding to support faculty and staff through the University College Cork and WAVE Trauma Centre postgraduate diploma program. WAVE is a grassroots organization in Belfast that has spent more than three decades supporting survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles, and its clinical expertise is built into the credential. Eleven LBCC faculty and staff have been fully funded to complete or are currently completing those graduate credentials, drawn from anthropology, reading, early childhood education, nutrition, psychology, student services and human resources. A trauma-informed institution cannot be built by psychologists alone, and the funding pattern reflected that. Just as important was alignment in three directions at once. Leadership support created the conditions, but the work developed top-down, middle-out and bottom-up simultaneously. The middle-out piece matters more than it is usually given credit for. Deans and department heads in the middle of the org chart protected resources, and in the case of LBCC’s workgroup, two deans have held ongoing seats. That meant budget conversations happened in real time rather than through intermediaries, and decisions moved faster because the people with spending authority were in the room. Faculty and staff enrolled in the credential program on their own professional commitment, filling out the bottom-up dimension. When an institution moves in all three directions at once, the work develops roots that outlast any single champion or budget cycle. Finally, there was the recognition that training is foundational, not sufficient. Workshops on secondary traumatic stress, burnout and compassion fatigue are not an add-on to a trauma-informed approach. Faculty and staff who are themselves overwhelmed cannot create the conditions for student learning. Resiliency-building and stress-reduction programming for employees was treated as central to the work, not peripheral to it. From an institutional perspective, this work was a clear priority. The need was evident, the alignment with the college’s strategic plan was direct, and the approach brought together faculty, student services and human resources in a coordinated way. A college president cannot drive this kind of change alone, and it is not the responsibility of any single office to do so. What leadership can do is recognize when a cross-campus effort has the structure and momentum to scale and commit the resources to sustain it. For colleges looking to move beyond training, the question is not whether to do this work, but how to organize it in a way that can be sustained. The belonging data we have seen at LBCC reflects the work of many initiatives across the college. It rose from 49% in 2021 to 92% by 2023. Trauma-informed practice was one of those initiatives, but its impact was amplified because it was built into the institution’s structure rather than operating alongside it. What is portable The UCC and WAVE partnership is specific to LBCC. The Trauma Studies academic pathway, which will launch in fall 2026 and may be the first standalone undergraduate Trauma Studies Associate in Science degree in the country, is specific to LBCC. But the institutional model is not. Any community college with a strategic commitment to this work, a cross-divisional coalition willing to commit budget from more than one line and leadership willing to back the structure can build this. The partnerships and programs will vary from institution to institution. The infrastructure can travel. The work ahead Training is not infrastructure. The field’s conversation has to catch up to that distinction, and community colleges are positioned to lead it. The students we serve cannot wait for trauma-informed practice to become an institutional afterthought. What they need is coordinated, sustained institutional capacity: the kind that survives budget cycles and leadership transitions because it is built into how the college operates. That is the work, and community colleges can do it. * * * Kyran McBride Barr , Ed.D., is professor of psychology at Long Beach City College and co-chair of the college’s Trauma-Informed Approach Workgroup. He led the development of the Trauma Studies academic pathway, which launches as a degree program this fall. Michael Muñoz , Ed.D., is superintendent-president of the Long Beach Community College District. Under his leadership, LBCC received the 2025 AACC Award of Excellence for Advancing Institutional Equity and Belonging. The post Trauma-informed colleges need systems, not just training first appeared on Community College Daily .

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