We are pleased to offer state-of-the-art intensive learning experiences through the Pacific Southwest Mental Health Technology Transfer Center (MHTTC). Guided by SAMHSA’s priorities, we serve the states and islands of the Pacific Southwest, or Region 9: Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, American Samoa, Guam, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Northern Mariana Islands, and Palau.
Regionally, we provide training, technical assistance (TTA), and resource dissemination to the Pacific Southwest mental health workforce, including the school-based mental health workforce. The collaborative MHTTC Network model is designed to support adoption and effective implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) across the mental health continuum of care, as well as increase workforce leadership and capacity in each region.
Nationally, the Pacific Southwest MHTTC provides intensive learning experiences that build workforce capacity to outreach, engage, and retain youth and young adults of transition age in effective mental health services.
Our intensive learning experiences are provided at NO COST to groups that meet the minimum number of participants.*
Phone: (844) 856-1749 Email: [email protected]
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Please note:
Adaptive Leadership for Early Career Professionals
This adaptive leadership training advances the capabilities of young adults serving in new or early career professional roles in the mental and behavioral health system (e.g., engagement, peer support, advocacy). Participants will identify individual capacity to lead and develop a sense of their personal leadership style. Participants will develop strategies to apply personal leadership potential to their current role.
Leading from the Balcony and from Among the Trees
As the mental health workforce diversifies, the culture of mental health service-providing organizations can be infused with new values, behaviors, attitudes, and practices. Leaders and managers have opportunities to incorporate diverse cultural perspectives into staff roles and responsibilities. This training focuses on the adaptive work that leadership staff need to undertake to bring diverse perspectives to the table to address the challenging issues of current-day organizations.
Integrating Cultural and Linguistic Competence: Lead from Where You Are
The integration of cultural and linguistic competence (CLC) is adaptive work that requires shifts in values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors around diversity and cultural groups. Join us to obtain a conceptual foundation of CLC (including definitions, frameworks, and concepts), participate in a self-assessment, and examine CLC as a change process. We will assess the leadership required to motivate and manage the change to integrate CLC into systems and service delivery.
Emotionally Intelligent Leadership Training
Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM) partners with activists, advocates, teachers, educators, and executives to support them in managing stress and trauma in their organizations. This training provides participants with the necessary tools to help incorporate emotional justice, equity, and wellness into their approach to leadership, as well as their organization’s practices and processes.
This training is provided by our partners the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective.
Social Justice Informed Mental Health Literacy (SJM) This intensive learning experience focuses on improving mental health outcomes, alleviating stigma, and providing tools and skills in social-justice informed peer support for marginalized communities. Participants are provided with a broad overview of mental health diagnoses, therapy, and counseling skills. Participants are educated in the psychological impacts of transphobia, racism, misogynoir, and homophobia.
This training is provided by our partners the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective.
Leading Trauma-informed Organizations
This learning session is focused on building leadership skills and capacities to apply the trauma-informed systems principles to leading self, others, and organizations.
This training is provided by our partners at Trauma Transformed, a program of the East Bay Agency for Children.
Trauma Informed Systems 101
This training’s purpose is to understand how stress and trauma impact individuals, communities, organizations and systems. We will bring a cross-section of our workforce together (janitors, counselors, administrative supports, clinical staff, leadership, etc.) to develop shared language and understanding of what it means to be a trauma-informed organization. Together we will learn to apply common practices to help our communities and organizations build resilience and heal.
This training is provided by our partners at Trauma Transformed, a program of the East Bay Agency for Children.
Building a Diverse Workforce from the Ground Up
This training explores workforce diversity to support improving access to health and health care for communities of color. We will build on the Pacific Southwest Mental Health Technology Transfer Center’s “Assessing Workforce Diversity: A Tool for Mental Health Organizations on the Path to Health Equity,” a self-assessment instrument designed to help mental health organizations explore their implementation of workforce diversity strategies. We will address six areas: Leadership and Governance; Recruitment; Orientation, Onboarding, and Ongoing Training; Retention and Professional Development; Communication; and Partnership and Community Goals.
Exploring Implicit Bias and its Impact in Mental Health Service Space
Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Everyone has them, and becoming mindful of how implicit and explicit biases impact our work with others is important. This training provides an avenue for initiating conversations around implicit bias. It offers opportunities to think about what we bring to the work of supporting mental health and wellness among the diverse populations we serve.
Effective Interventions for Diverse Communities: Taking a Community-Led Approach
This training focuses on celebrating culture and communities, and explores what communities do to implement programs and practices that work. The training explores how we collectively approach the concept of evidence, effectiveness of practices, and the role of communities in achieving positive outcomes for individuals experiencing mental health conditions. The discussion is intended to be helpful for a variety of different audiences, including clinicians, mental health program providers, and evaluators.
Serving Pacific Islanders from a Pacific Perspective: Incorporating Cultural Practices and Understanding into our Work
This training is designed to serve practitioners and service providers who want to better understand Pacific Islanders. We discuss Pacific Competence, the islands of Fiji, Hawaii, Samoa, and Tonga, and how these individuals understand their health. We will incorporate culturally appropriate language about mental health and ways to work with Pacific Islanders.
This training is provided by our partners at Taulama for Tongans.
Black Mental Health and Healing Justice
This training is a two-day, mental health literacy and healing justice training for educators, clinicians, and community members who work with, live in, and support Black communities. Participants learn about common disorders, diagnoses, myths, and unique strategies and community-defined interventions to address mental health challenges in Black communities. Participants are equipped with tools and skills to offer healing justice-informed peer support.
This training is provided by our partners the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective.
Building the Foundation for Youth Peer Support
Jumpstart the development of youth peer support in your agency, department, organization, or school! Throughout the training, instructors will offer clear lessons learned from the early implementation of youth peer support. We cover the core components of youth peer support program development including: defining services, the continuum of helping relationships, agency culture, selecting and developing curricula, support for the youth peer support workforce, and early financing considerations (including Medicaid). Through focusing and defining the ideal service for your area, effective implementation can follow.
From Risk to Resiliency
This session is designed to provide an overview of the resilience approach to prevention practice. Whether referred to as positive youth development, empowerment, strengths-based approach, asset-building or resilience, this paradigm shifts the focus in prevention from risk factors, damage, deficits, and youth as problem, to protective factors, strengths, assets, and YOUTH AS RESOURCE. Resilience is a developmental approach empowering youth-serving professionals and other youth advocates to promote the healthy development of young people – even those already experiencing challenges.
An Introduction to an Interconnected Systems Framework for Integrated Student Supports
This session provides an introduction to the Interconnected Systems Framework (ISF), a framework designed to merge school mental health and multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) approaches.
This training is provided by our partners at the Center for Social Behavior Support (CSBS).
When School Mental Health is Integrated within a Multi-Tiered System of Support: What’s Different
This session builds on the introduction to the Interconnected Systems Framework (ISF). We examine ways in which school leadership can integrate school mental health into their existing MTSS systems to ensure a single system of delivery and to move beyond access to outcomes.
This training is provided by our partners at the Center for Social Behavior Support (CSBS).
Leveraging an Enhanced MTSS to Effectively Use Data to Identify Need and Select, Implement, and Monitor Interventions
This session is the advanced training for schools and their leaders who have a strong MTSS in place and would like a facilitated opportunity to dive deeper into core features such as expanded data; universal screening for internalizing and externalizing needs; and selecting, implementing, and monitoring interventions.
This training is provided by our partners at the Center for Social Behavior Support (CSBS).
Supporting Children, Staff, and Schools at Times of Crisis and Loss
This training helps classroom educators and other school professionals learn skills in how to talk with and support individual students or the entire class/school as they struggle to understand and cope with a crisis or loss in their lives. Together, we consider the common symptoms of adjustment reactions in children and adolescents that may occur in response to a crisis; the timeline for adjustment for children and teens after a crisis event; issues of professional self-care when supporting children who are grieving or adjusting to a crisis event; and more.
This training is provided by our partners at the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement.
Supporting Children, Families, and Ourselves at Times of Crisis
Crises have the potential to cause short- and long-term effects on the psychological functioning, emotional adjustment, health, and developmental trajectory of children. This session will provide practical suggestions on how to identify common adjustment difficulties in children at times of crisis and to promote effective coping strategies. Crisis events often impact providers/adults to at least the same degree they impact children. In addition, being with children and families who are in distress can be distressing for providers. The importance of professional self-care and strategies to address this need will be included.
This training is provided by our partners at the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement.
Supporting the Grieving Student and Family
Virtually all children experience the death of a friend or family member at some point in their childhood. Even though bereavement is a normative experience, a loss can have a significant impact on children’s psychological adjustment, academic achievement, and personal development. This presentation will provide insight into how children come to understand and adjust to a loss. It will offer practical suggestions on how adults can talk with children and provide needed support.
This training is provided by our partners at the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement.
Compassionate and Trauma-Informed Policy: Design, Create, and Implement
Want to figure out how to create and develop policies that contribute to trauma-informed school environments? Tasked with ensuring trauma informed work is sustainable and scalable at your school, district office, agency, department, or organization? Together we’ll explore the four choice points leaders face, and discuss tips for successful policy development and implementation. We will explore examples of current policy at the local, district, state, and federal levels from which you can choose and use for your own work.
Student Wellness for Student Success: Mental Health Literacy for Educators
The impact of children's mental health on schools—teachers, classrooms, students, and staff—can be significant. School practices that promote mental health and wellbeing can also make a difference. This training provides administrators, teachers, and staff with tools to make a difference in the lives of their students and in the learning climate of the classroom and campus. Additional modules may include: Student Mental Health; Social-Emotional Development, Mental Health, and Learning; and Making Wellness Accessible to Students and Families.
Creating Cohesive, Equitable, and Stakeholder-driven School Mental Health Referral Pathways: 101
Together, we investigate how school mental health referral pathways (SMHRPs) improve coordination and collaboration – both within schools and between schools and other youth-serving agencies. Participants will gain tools to assess their readiness for implementation. We will learn key strategies and principles to build effective SMHRPs, such as how to define roles and responsibilities for partnerships, information-sharing procedures, and how to make intervention decisions collaboratively through a youth-engaged and equity lens.
Please note that after completing the 101 session, the following advanced and customized modules are available: Population specific: students with developmental disabilities, students who identify as LGBTQI, students who identify as undocumented/mixed status, and students with co-occurring and/or serious mental illness challenges; Stakeholder engagement: creating student-driven SMHRPs, family/parent partnerships.
School District and State System Leadership on Creating Systems for School Employee Sustainability and Wellness
This training tackles the complexity and opportunity of leading with a sustainability lens. We start with the personal sustainability of school site leaders and district personnel. We provide tools, dialogue, and resources for leaders to hone their well-being in authentic leadership. We will explore new lenses for approaching the reality of leading in high-trauma, under-resourced environments, along with navigating the challenging adult dynamics this context can create for on-site and district level leaders. The training explores the impact of our natural stress responses, and how to navigate while creating healthy boundaries that support sustainability for self and others.
This training is provided by our partners at The Teaching Well.
Whole Staff Wellness Professional Development
Through seven professional development modules, you and your staff will explore what sustainability means in your organization. Through research-based mindfulness strategies, trauma-informed care, and neuroscience, the sessions provide concrete tools to help you make informed choices, cultivate energy, and stay connected to colleagues throughout the work year. Modules include stress resilience, managing transferred trauma, and healthy communication.
This training is provided by our partners at The Teaching Well.
