Join us for MOTA 2025!
Building Safe and Inclusive Spaces: The Power of a Trauma-Informed Approach
With a quest to promote occupational justice, inclusion is at the forefront of our profession. Occupational therapy practitioners help people, communities, and organizations feel included and supported. We work closely with the people to promote, restore, or maintain skills; we modify environments; we advocate and educate about policies and practices all to advance potential for inclusion. Attitudes, values, and beliefs about inclusion are tightly interwoven with roles, rituals, and routines. When someone goes through a traumatic event, it can affect them and the systems around them. This can make it harder to support inclusion and reach good outcomes. Join Dr. Amy Lynch in exploring aspects of inclusion from a trauma informed approach lens. Together, we will consider how using trauma informed principles and practical strategies, stories, and self-reflection can build safe and inclusive spaces for meaningful engagement in occupations.
Dr. Amy Lynch is an associate professor at the College of Public Health in the occupational therapy program at Temple University, founder of the non-profit Futures Rise, and an OT for almost 35 years. Her postdoctoral training has included intensive trauma training and an approved educator status of Trust Based Relational Intervention (TBRI ® – Dr. Karyn Purvis,Texas Christian University) and Phase 1 certification in the NMT measure (Bruce Perry, Child Trauma Academy). She is trained in all of the HALO Project curriculum, is a Making Sense of Your Self Worth facilitator and a Parenting for Positive Self Worth facilitator, and has trained in Theraplay and Nurtured Heart approach. She was a post-doctoral fellow with Mary Dozier at University of Delaware “Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch Up (ABC)”. She is the lead editor for the American Occupational Therapy Association’s first ever book on trauma: Trauma, Occupation, and Participation: Foundations and Population Considerations for Occupational Therapy. She likes to be sure to note, she did that together with one of her best friends and OT colleague, Rachel Ashcraft. Since 2019, she has received over $1,000,000 in funding as PI or Co-PI to support trauma-informed, occupation-focused education setting-related inclusion promotion research. Funded projects have included: Pennsylvania Commission for Crime and Delinquency Violence Prevention Grant for development of a public health aligned, trauma informed intervention model for a high school, United Way for early childhood needs assessment, a FirstUp grant for early childhood school intervention, and a PA Disabilities grant for preschool to prison pipeline, trauma informed disruption work. In recent years, she refined a model that trained over 200 early childhood educators in trauma-informed strategies, and delivered an inclusion focused trauma informed, evidence applied, play and activity based interactive social emotional learning curriculum to 56 classrooms, reaching approximately 1,000 children and their families. This model was also a vehicle for over 50 occupational therapy FWI, FWII, and eOTD Capstone students, future undergraduate and graduate professionals learning about trauma informed care. Dr. Lynch has presented regionally, nationally, and internationally on topics including but not limited to: trauma; early adversity, attachment, social emotional regulation, family occupations, international/domestic adoption and foster care, feeding, eating, and swallowing, and developmental care. Her favorite role is one of proud “Mom” to two amazing children. As she navigates parenting amidst the complex during- and post-pandemic climate atop her professional experiences, Lynch aims to realize and respond to just how pervasive trauma can be upon habits, roles, routines. She seeks to utilize meaningful occupational engagement and principles from OT theory and evidence-based trauma-informed care models throughout her teaching and professional and personal interactions. Lynch recognizes that paradigm shifts and building wide changes are a “big ask”. Therefore, she aims to come alongside school based communities empowering regulation; prioritizing safe, connected relationships; and supporting the learning and reasoning skills of herself, her family, her students, the educators, staff, administrators, and families, in all of the communities she is honored to work alongside.
