Podcast Transcript: Dr. Sandra Bloom

Dr. Sandra Bloom is one of the creators of the Sanctuary Model, an evidence-based practice that helps youth-serving programs address trauma experienced by their clients and their staff. Dr. Bloom spoke with NCFY about her program's origins and the importance of trauma-informed practice.

Time: 4:33 | Size: 4.2 MB

NCFY: Welcome to Voices from the Field, a podcast series from the Family and Youth Services Bureau. Dr. Sandra Bloom is one of the co-creators of the evidence-based Sanctuary Model, which tailors every aspect of a youth program to help participants and staff heal from trauma.

Organizations who want to become Sanctuary approved embark on a 3-year process of classroom and on-the-job training for everyone from the board down to cleaning staff and youth themselves. We asked Dr. Bloom how she developed her model.

BLOOM: I started out as a psychiatrist. I ran an inpatient unit for over 20 years. We specialized in treating adults who were abused as children. So that’s where the Sanctuary Model originated. We started to recognize that the stresses that were happening in the system--changes in funding, changes in regulations, things like that, but things over which we as staff members had no control--they were affecting us and the way we delivered service. 

So the more stress we had, the more we were likely to pass that onto our patients. It became evident that it wasn’t just them. Many of us had had similar experiences in our childhood that could be affecting the way we were delivering services. 

Every system can profoundly improve its own level of function. But to do that, you have to get people on the same page, speaking the same language and sharing a theoretical, but practical framework. And that’s really what Sanctuary’s designed to be.

NCFY: At the center of the Sanctuary Model’s 3‑year implementation process is a series of trainings around the seven "Sanctuary Commitments," the ideals that every staff member and youth are expected to respect and embody. 

BLOOM: The seven Sanctuary commitments are the commitment to non-violence, emotional intelligence, social learning, open communication, social responsibility, democracy, and growth and change. And these represent the values that everybody in the system must embrace. 

So what we would want to see is children being able to talk about the ways in which they’re safe or they’re not safe in any given moment. We would want to see the staff and child interactions be more around conversations around safety and what does it take to be safe? Rather than punishments, consequences, labeling of bad behavior, we’d really want to see a shift in that and hear more about, "Well, right now I’m not feeling safe. Are you feeling safe? And what do we have to do in order for both of us to feel safer?"

We want to find staff finding ways to include children in the decisions that affect them. And we do that routinely through community meetings. We want to see that going on all the time, that children are really included in their treatment planning, that when a policy is going to be changed or something needs to be addressed, that it’s done in a community framework that the children and the staff participate in together. 

That’s really what Sanctuary is about is providing a safe place for everybody. It has to be safe for the kids, but it can’t be safe for the kids unless it’s safe for the staff. And it can’t be safe for the staff unless it’s also safe for the administrators. 

There really has to be a parallel process of recovery. And that is what the Sanctuary Model is designed to be. It’s really to bring a parallel process of recovery to the whole institution. Because we cannot deal with these problems as simply individual problems, because they’re not. 

NCFY: For more information on evidence‑based practice and trauma informed care, visit the National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth, online at ncfy.acf.hhs.gov.

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