Exploring Trauma-Informed Organizational Practices and Self-Care:
Strengthening Resilience Factors Among Child Welfare Workers
Due to the traumatic nature of child welfare work, professionals employed in this sector experience significant threats to well-being, with estimates suggesting that nearly one in three experience secondary traumatic stress (STS; Baugerud et al., 2018; Rienks, 2020). STS arises from the ongoing immersion and exposure to the primary trauma of an individual client or community (Ludick & Figley, 2017). The effects and consequences of STS mirror posttraumatic stress disorder and can affect well-being and job performance, such as difficulty sleeping, recurring distressing thoughts, a reluctance to engage with their caseload, and a heightened stress response in the body (Bercier & Maynard, 2015; Ludick & Figley, 2017). As such, the most recent version of the American Psychiatric Association’s (2022) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders included posttraumatic stress disorder diagnostic criteria for secondary exposures to trauma.
Because STS is a significant occupational hazard in child welfare work, contributing to elevated levels of burnout, diminished job satisfaction, and an increased likelihood of staff turnover (Lizano & Mor Barak, 2015; Rienks, 2020), there has been an increased focus on strengthening resilience among these professionals (Clark et al., 2024; Orsi-Hunt et al., 2023; Salloum et al., 2015). Recent research has conceptualized resilience as a multifactor process that buffers individuals and communities from trauma and adversity (Hamby, 2025), reframing resilience as more than a static set of characteristics. Rather, models such as the Resilience Portfolio Model (RPM; Grych et al., 2015; Hamby, 2025), suggest that resilience includes an array of protective factors across domains such as regulatory, meaning making, interpersonal, and environmental/ecological strengths. Selfcare is regularly suggested as a strategy for fostering resilience, improving coping skills, and has been associated with decreased severity of STS among child welfare workers (Clark, Miller, et al., 2025; Salloum et al., 2019). Godfrey et al. (2011) explained that “Selfcare involves a range of care activities deliberately engaged throughout life to promote physical, mental and emotional health, maintain life and prevent disease” (p. 11). Self-care is engaging individually for the benefit of one’s own well-being but may involve seeking support from outside entities including social and relational supports, as well as collaborating with others to improve well-being such as working with a health care provider (Godfrey et al., 2011). Despite the recognition of self-care as a strategy to mitigate STS (Clark, Miller, et al., 2025;J. Lee & Miller, 2013; Stanley et al., 2023), the research indicates that child welfare workers engage in self-care practices to a limited extent, despite experiencing high levels of occupational stress (Miller et al., 2019).
Many suggest that placing the responsibility for self-care fully on individuals ignores the role of organizational barriers in high-demand work settings such as child welfare (Clark, Miller, et al., 2025; K. Lee et al., 2017; Newell & Nelson-Gardell, 2014). Proponents of community care suggest that well-being is achieved collectively and propose that structures and organizations support well-being by reducing barriers and facilitating a shared responsibility for wellbeing (Chamberlain, 2020; Grise-Owens et al., 2023; Pyles, 2020). Thus, investigating how organizational and leadership practices may influence self-care among child welfare workers is necessary. This study seeks to explore the association between trauma-informed organizational practices and self-care behaviors among child welfare professionals.
Conceptual Foundation for Self-Care and Organizational Support as Resilience Factors
The Compassion Fatigue Resilience Model (CFRM; Ludick & Figley, 2017) suggests four factors that support helping professionals in developing resilience to STS. Those factors include self-care, an ability to detach from work, a sense of satisfaction, and social support. While these factors are positioned as equally important within the CFRM, this article focuses primarily on self-care. Ludick and Figley (2017) described self-care as critical to posttraumatic growth and highlighted holistic approaches to self-care that foster resilience through both prevention of and responsiveness to STS.
While the CFRM frames self-care as individual practice to promote resilience, self-care in the child welfare profession must be understood as informed by and dependent upon ecological and structural supports (Clark, Miller, et al., 2025). Therefore, this article also draws from the RPM (Grych et al., 2015; Hamby, 2025), which highlights both individual (i.e., regulatory and meaning making) and ecological protective factors (e.g., relational and environmental). Ecological factors influencing self-care, and by extension resilience, among child welfare professionals may include organizational resources, leadership attitudes, and workplace policies that support or limit self-care behaviors. While individual self-care, a regulatory strength, is associated with lower STS, access to impactful and consistent self-care is often contingent upon ecological assets such as agency culture and policies (Clark, Miller, et al., 2025), requiring child welfare professionals to self-regulate their well-being without organizational support risks exploitation, particularly in high-stress systems that contribute to STS (Clark, Miller, et al., 2025).