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Gabriella Grant Consulting (GGC) offers consultation and training on a wide variety of topics relevant to the multi-faceted experiences of trauma-exposed populations.

About Gabriella Grant

Gabriella brings to her consultation and training work a long history of professional experience developing innovative programs for female offenders, crime victims, and domestic violence survivors. Through this work she has also gained an understanding of how program design, policies and procedures can positively affect the people being served. She earned her undergraduate degree from Amherst College, a Latin teaching certificate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy and a Masters in Public Policy from The Johns Hopkins University. She has taught at the primary, secondary and university levels and has trained professionals, advocates and consumers in a wide variety of settings.

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Trauma Informed Consultation
Trauma Informed Training

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Trauma Informed Training

Trauma Informed Training

Trauma Informed Training

Gabriella Grant Consulting, Inc. (GGC) provides training to clinical and non-clinical staff in order to develop a therapeutically beneficial milieu within which specific interventions and treatments can function more effectively.

Below is an accordion list of our current training topics. Expand a topic name to see a description of its training content.

Trainings are delivered as 90-minute synchronous learning webinars. In addition, trainings in some separate topic areas have been developed together so that they can be presented as the multiple parts of a combined webinar series.

If there is a topic that your agency would like that is not listed below, upon further consultation, GGC can prepare a tailored webinar or provide a referral to another consulting agency. Past tailored webinar topics have included trauma and suicide in Los Angeles County and domestic violence and trauma.

Two-Part Training Topics


Part 1 (90 minutes)
Part 2 (90 minutes)
This training focuses on aspects to improve the co-occurring treatment of trauma and substance abuse issues as well as the integration of both issues when only one condition is under treatment. Using the standards from SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach and TIP 57, attendees will have a strong set of skills to treat clients who struggle with historically challenging yet far too common conditions. Evidence-based practices will be identified and foundational skills will be practiced during the training.


Part 1 (90 minutes)
Part 2 (90 minutes)
Neurobiology shows that traumatic events affect the brain at the time of the event and over the lifespan. Once the neurobiology of trauma is understood, through a user-friendly approach, staff and agencies can better understand client reactions, better understand how to minimize re-traumatization and triggering interaction, and know how to use neurobiology to create safety and connection.


Part 1: Distinguishing Grief and Loss, Trauma, PTSD (90 minutes)
Part 2: Complex trauma, C-PTSD and Developmental Trauma (90 minutes)
This training covers the current research regarding PTSD and Complex Trauma. It allows participants to have a familiarity with trauma-related terms, identify trauma symptoms, and identify responses that can exacerbate or alleviate trauma responses.


Part 1: Trauma Informed Foundations (90 minutes)
Part 2: Safety Planning (90 minutes)
This training provides a research-based understanding that supports active safety skills building and planning for youth at risk of CSEC (commercial sexual exploitation of children) and other coercive labor practices. It offers practitioners, whether clinicians or not, safety-based interventions to help young people recognize exploitation and coercion. Using a safety plan, professionals can measure risk reductions to help youth navigate their current circumstances. Attendees are requested to read the Sexual Assault Revictimization Risk Reduction white paper before the webinar.


Part 1: The Self (90 minutes)
Part 2: The Environment (90 minutes)
This training is designed to promote standards of self care within trauma-informed organizations and systems. Using the Harris and Fallot “impact of trauma work” model, this training looks at the impact of primary trauma on the workforce and its role in the development of work-related trauma symptoms. Attendees will be able to assess themselves, create a self care plan and experience an active demonstration of self care during the training.


Part 1 (90 minutes)
Part 2 (90 minutes)
This training gives providers a research-based understanding of eating disorders, their cultural role, and how to treat eating disorders (primary, secondary and tertiary). Attendees will gain skills to discuss disordered eating and exercise in safety-focused ways that also facilitate trauma recovery. Ideally, attendees apply these concepts to themselves first, so that they can more clearly work with clients’ disordered eating and exercise issues.


Part 1: How do trauma and hoarding intersect? (90 minutes)
Part 2: Trauma-informed approaches to addressing unsafe hoarding behaviors (90 minutes)
This training explores the research between trauma exposure, specifically in childhood, and later-in-life unsafe hoarding behaviors. Focusing on “forcible removal” as a traumatic exposure, this training offers voluntary agreements as an underutilized strategy to address safety issues related to hoarding.


Part 1 (90 minutes)
Part 2 (90 minutes)
This training provides a framework to enhance parenting safety. A research-based overview, it focuses on safety, child abuse law, casework practice and the interaction between parenting and the impact of trauma and disaster on both the child and parent. It considers emerging research into the intergenerational transmission of trauma as well as practice approaches to help parents increase both physical and emotional safety in their interactions with their children.


Part 1: The evidence on spirituality as a trauma recovery tool (90 minutes)
Part 2: Working with trauma survivors of spiritual abuse, a form of trusted advisor abuse (90 minutes)
This training explores the research showing spirituality as an evidence-based practice for trauma recovery. The information provides ethical guidelines for publicly funded employees to bring safety to spiritual practices, as determined by the client. The second part of the training looks at spiritual abuse as a unique traumatic exposure that might get missed in the publicly funded system: how to report, how to support and how to connect survivors to safe groups and peers.


Part 1: Gender Matters for Criminal Justice Outcomes (90 minutes)
Part 2: Trauma Informed Approaches Address Trauma Themes (90 minutes)
This training explores two frameworks for service providers when working with incarcerated or released women. In the first webinar, trends of incarceration by gender and race provide a historical birds-eye view to then focus on gendered differences among incarcerated people in more recent times. Evidence of unique patterns within female populations is explored. Gender-responsive standards, as delineated by Covington and Owens, are reviewed to allow attendees to assess their services—both areas of strengths and weaknesses. In the second webinar, trauma exposure specific to having an incarcerated family member is explored, uncovering a unique trauma-related factor that can be addressed within programming. The standards of trauma-informed care, according to SAMHSA, are reviewed as well as several specific curricula, Beyond Trauma, Helping Women Recover, Seeking Safety, etc., for incarcerated women.


Part 1 (90 minutes)
Part 2 (90 minutes)
This training provides approaches for understanding trauma, PTSD and complex PTSD as keys to working with individuals at risk for suicide or self harm. It considers how a trauma informed framework helps services prevent suicide and self harm in trauma-exposed populations and how to develop a relapse prevention intervention that addresses suicide.


Part 1: Steps One Through Three (90 minutes)
Part 2: Steps Four Through Six (90 minutes)
This training provides participants, managers, line staff, and administrators with key elements of what a trauma informed program looks like (and does not look like). It follows the 2001 “Using Trauma Theory to Design Service Systems” framework, as well as providing resources for assessing and transforming agencies to become more trauma informed.

One-Part Training Topics


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
This training will enhance clinicians’ skills for discussing unsafe behaviors in a safe manner without victim-blaming. It reviews data on clinical use of a tool to measure unsafe behaviors (UBI-Y) and explores the safety drive biological imperative within the framework of Polyvagal Theory by Porges. Attendees will learn how to build clients’ safety skills using the “It Makes Sense” activity and the Anytime Safe Action Plan worksheet.


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
Housing, sheltering and residential facilities face unique challenges when providing services to clients who are also residents. Designed to offer housing agencies and staff a structure for applying trauma-informed practices to housing-related situations, this webinar is an agency-wide introduction to foundational steps for creating an organizational culture of trauma-informed transformation. (This training can be taught as a stand-alone 90-minute webinar and is also developed so that it can be presented as Part 1 of a combined series that includes Trauma and Homelessness as Part 2 and Rules as Part 3.)


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
This webinar looks at themes related to rules and trauma. It teaches a decision-tree to objectively write rules for trauma-exposed individuals, especially when the program frequently uses consequences, exiting, and other punishments for rule breaking. Participants are offered an opportunity to transform a broken rule from their program or home. (This training can be taught as a stand-alone 90-minute webinar and is also developed so that it can be presented as Part 3 of a combined series that includes Foundations (Housing and Essential Services) as Part 1 and Trauma and Homelessness as Part 2.)


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
This webinar teaches sexual assault victim advocates active skills to work effectively with sexual assault victims. Attendees will learn best practices related to safety planning to prompt a clear set of response actions before, during, and after a sexual assault.


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
Homelessness is both caused by trauma and is a symptom of trauma. By focusing shelter or program rules on safety, empowerment, and addressing unsafe behavior in a compassionate manner, agencies working on addressing homelessness in their communities can improve client outcomes, create safer shelters, and reduce staff burnout. (This training can be taught as a stand-alone 90-minute webinar and is also developed so that it can be presented as Part 2 of a combined series that includes Foundations (Housing and Essential Services) as Part 1 and Rules as Part 3.)


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
This training introduces “anytime” Safety Planning skills with a specific focus on sex work. It includes a discussion of known trauma-related risk factors for sexual victimization and revictimization and provides a public health model context for safety planning around any situation where acquaintances, substance use, and/or sexual encounters are a possibility. (This training can be taught as a stand-alone 90-minute webinar and is also developed so that it can be presented as Part 2 of a combined series that includes Trauma and Sex Work: Universal Precautions as Part 1 and Trauma and Sex Work: Sexual Exploitation and Coercion Scale as Part 3.)


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
This training focuses on de-escalation and using the Sexual Exploitation and Coercion Scale. It explains Neuroception as the constant and continuous appraisal of safety, danger and life threat and introduces risk reduction skills, encouraging survivors to self-assess threat in environments using internal and external cues. Participants will learn how to work with survivors in rating their own definitions of sexual coercion using the Scale. (This training can be taught as a stand-alone 90-minute webinar and is also developed so that it can be presented as Part 3 of a combined series that includes Trauma and Sex Work: Universal Precautions as Part 1 and Trauma and Sex Work: Safety Planning as Part 2.)


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
This training provides a framework for understanding sex work and its regulation models. Using a review of four separate models along with considerations of the rights of sex workers and key distinctions between commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC), human trafficking, sex trafficking of a minor and adult sex work, the framework settles on the agreed-upon approach to sex work within a feminist framework. Called “decriminalization” of sex work, this policy proves to be the safest for all those who have been sexually coerced or exploited. The training then provides overall recommendations for increasing safety by using universal precautions around trauma exposure and sexual coercion and exploitation. (This training can be taught as a stand-alone 90-minute webinar and is also developed so that it can be presented as Part 1 of a combined series that includes Trauma and Sex Work: Safety Planning as Part 2 and Trauma and Sex Work: Sexual Exploitation and Coercion Scale as Part 3.)


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
Trauma informed communication aims to build clinical skills specifically to address unsafe behaviors in a safe manner without victim-blaming. Based on a client-centered approach, it incorporates how speech develops over the lifespan and how trauma interrupts that development. The training reviews communication theory (Watzlawick, 1967), explores the safety drive within the Polyvagal theoretical framework (Porges, 2009) and presents the “It Makes Sense” technique designed to gain client agreement to build safety skills.


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
Designed to teach clinical professionals active skills to work effectively with trauma-exposed clients, this 90-minute training asks attendees to examine de-escalation, safety planning and grounding as key safety skills for any clinical professional working in publicly funded systems. Attendees will be able to use scaling to measure danger levels and use sensory awareness/grounding practices to detach from overwhelming emotions, as well as learning about safety planning and using the Anytime Safe Action Plan worksheet.


One-part webinar (90 minutes)
This training provides an overview of the six key steps for development of a trauma informed program. It provides resources for assessing and transforming agencies to become more trauma informed and teaches how to write an organization’s statement of commitment to trauma informed care. Attendees are asked to develop or find their agency’s statement of commitment; connect it to policies on universal precautions and disclosure of private, protected, personal information; eliminate jargon; and use the teach-back method to promote health literacy by confirming understanding.

Thank you so much for a dynamic, inspiring presentation yesterday for Berkeley Mental Health. I learned a lot from your training, and already applied it today!
— Thu A. Bui, M.D., Psychiatrist,
Berkeley Mental Health

On our last grant, the one you helped us initiate, we scored highest and got a 3 year grant based on our trauma informed services incorporating evidence based practices. We have an officially trained Seeking Safety trainer doing our support groups and we are using motivational interviewing with our clients with co-occurring DV, mental health and substance abuse issues. We couldn’t have done it without you!!!
— Tracy Lamb
Executive Director of Napa Emergency Women’s Services (NEWS)
domestic violence program

Trauma Informed Consultation

Trauma Informed Consultation

Trauma Informed Consultation

Gabriella Grant Consulting (GGC) provides tailored consultation for agencies wishing to develop a trauma informed framework, program design, policies, staff development, and data collection and measures. Contact GGC via the scheduling form, email at traumainformedcalifornia@gmail.com, or call us at 831-515-7570 to discuss your agency’s specific needs.

Consultation options include

  • Agency assessment and certification
  • Trauma informed program design
  • Curriculum development
  • Measuring, collecting and analyzing data
  • Rules, policies and procedures
  • Strategic planning
  • Elimination of seclusion and restraint

Recent Consultations

Short Term Residential Treatment Centers (Central California)

Due to legislation related to the Continuum of Care Reform effort, the State of California is phasing out traditional group homes. Short-Term Residential Therapeutic Centers (STRTCs) provide temporary, high quality, intensive interventions that are required to be trauma informed. A 100-year-old former group home and non-public school requested training and technical assistance for the STRTC accreditation process laid out by the state. First, the section for the STRTC related to trauma informed practices was developed in detail for the pending application. Feedback from the state indicated that the section on trauma informed practices was extremely well developed. An agency assessment—including an online staff self-assessment, an onsite focus group for staff and children, observation of services and a review of policies and procedures—resulted in an assessment of current practice and specific recommendations for progress toward the next level of transformation. A foundational training was developed and provided to staff, who rated the training as exceptionally helpful to their work.

Behavioral Healthcare

Onsite consultation for a multi-service behavioral health agency in rural Nebraska involved developing both an agency-wide framework based in the five core values of trauma informed service provision, as well as specific agency recommendations to develop strengths. For example, a safe, effective approach to practice emotional regulation was demonstrated with real clients at a day treatment program for adults with cognitive disabilities; staff then practiced conducting the techniques and developing creative ways to make them fun and practical.

Victim/Witness Program

After providing an all-day training on trauma informed services for all victim witness staff in a large urban community in Northern California, consultation included meeting with specific programs where staff completed a four-dimensional agency assessment. Based on the findings of the assessment, 10 key recommendations were developed and a strategic planning process involving all staff prioritized the 10 recommendations for the agency to focus on. One outcome was a survey for licensed therapists to complete in order to be included as a referral for crime victims; the survey asked specific questions related to trauma informed practice, training, and approach. Of the 70 therapists who completed the survey, about half were approved for referrals and the others were given a year to increase specific capacities.

Program Design and Residential Policies

A residential program for people with intellectual disabilities in Central Coastal California asked for consultation to improve program rules. Through the consultation, the agency was able to better understand how to create collaborative agreements related to program design and residential program elements. An example included a job readiness program that shifted from telling clients how to dress (“you must dress in business-appropriate clothes”) to creating meaningful goals that clients choose to work on: “Job seekers who dress professionally increase their job prospects, therefore I would like to dress for success while job searching.”