col•lab•o•ra•tion
With a live Mariachi band in the background and chips and salsa on the table, Naomi and Tray Strawhorn began sketching architectural plans on a white napkin—plans to expand their two-bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom home to make room for three siblings.
At the time, the Strawhorns were foster parents to a 5-year-old boy, named James. His sisters, Sarah and Marissa, were also in the foster-care system with another set of parents. When it became clear the children would not be able to reunify with their birth mother and that the other foster parents were unable to adopt, the Strawhorns were all in on adopting the three siblings.
Before becoming a foster care and adoptive mother, Naomi stumbled upon Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI). A friend from church, who knew the Strawhorns were interested in adoption, asked Naomi to join her at Show Hope’s Empowered to Connect Conference (now known as Hope for the Journey). Naomi began the simulcast skeptical but quickly became one of southern Mississippi’s biggest advocates, with a mission to equip as many people as possible with TBRI.
TBRI is for all people but was created to meet the needs of children who have experienced trauma, loss, and other harmful encounters—children who may have difficulty trusting loving adults in their lives. TBRI equips those adults to compassionately connect with children and teens expressing big behaviors or emotions.
“TBRI has held my family together,” Naomi said. “I don’t think that my family would be intact, and I don’t think my marriage would be intact if not for TBRI.”
Naomi works as a victim services coordinator at Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of South Mississippi, an organization that recruits, trains, and supports volunteers who advocate for children who have been abused or neglected. After seeing the fruits of TBRI in her own family, she approached her boss about bringing TBRI under the CASA umbrella.
Naomi’s boss found TBRI to be particularly impactful in child welfare and decided Naomi and a member of child protective services (CPS) should be trained in TBRI, with the goal of training other foster care parents. From that, Naomi applied for and received a Show Hope grant to attend a TBRI Practitioner Training. In October 2019, she became a practitioner, eventually leading to a wide-spreading ripple effect of TBRI implementation.
But first, COVID-19 shut down the world, and the needs of foster care parents rapidly grew. With permission, Naomi began offering TBRI training over Zoom calls.
“[Foster parents] started saying, ‘Why isn’t this required from CPS? When you’re a foster parent, why don’t you know this stuff? Because if we had known then what we know now, things would have been different, and we wouldn’t have been in this situation,’” Naomi recalled.
Naomi quickly realized she couldn’t keep TBRI under wraps. She began taking TBRI to more than just foster care parents. She and CASA took TBRI to court systems, mental health organizations, a pilot program at an elementary school, people incarcerated, and most recently, local law enforcement. To date, CASA has created a system where they have 200 TBRI Practitioners in the state.
“The keyword for us is collaboration,” Naomi said. “Any time we do something, we try to bring along other agencies as well. So doing things across sectors is really important. And doing things across offices is really important. So I like to say, ‘The work is hard, so we have to go together.’”
With all of the progress made in Mississippi, Naomi still had a burning desire to take TBRI to those who, she said, needed it most … biological parents. Before she adopted her children, Naomi’s heart ached for their birth mother. The moment the adoptions were finalized, Naomi began searching for her. Today, Naomi said she and her family have a wonderful relationship with her children’s birth mother, but she’s working so that other biological parents in similar shoes can have access to TBRI before it’s too late.
“My biggest hope and my biggest encouragement is that we now have TBRI Practitioners who have lived experience within the system,” Naomi said. “So these are parents who have their kiddos with them, who struggled with the same thing that my kiddos’ parent struggled with, who now have permanency, who went back and got a certification through our department of mental health. And they now work as peer-support specialists within the system. We have five of them who are now practitioners who are planning on training others through a mental health organization, through the court. And so they are the right people to train others in this.”
In the end, Naomi said the movement and growth she’s seeing in Mississippi would not have been possible without Show Hope.
“Along the way they are a little piece of TBRI that would not be present in Mississippi at all had I not attended that first conference, had I not gotten that [grant], had I not been accepted to that practitioner training,” Naomi said. “And in reality, a lot of my teaching moments came from my own home and how I had witnessed that, Oh my gosh, I had no idea that all of this anger and all of this behavior came originally from a place of hurt, which came from that person’s parents’ place of hurt … and we can go back generations. But along the way, without Show Hope’s influence—and I mean this whole-heartedly—we would not have the work that we are doing, the system collaboration that we’re doing …none of that would exist without Show Hope. It really wouldn’t.”
This Christmas, we have strategically planned to raise $500,000 for the continuing impact of our work, yet we cannot reach that goal without you. Today, will you prayerfully consider a gift to our Gifts of Hope campaign? We need you.
