This training is presented by The Professional Youth Worker. It's our mission to help you and your team build your skills and boost your passion for serving young people. Join us!
Transformative Conflict: A Trauma-Informed Approach to De-escalation, Healing, & Accountability

- On-Demand Webinar
- Recorded on Wednesday, November 11, 2020
- 2 hour training
- FREE for YIPA members
- $40 for non-YIPA members
- 97% approval rating
- Not a member? Annual membership is $124 for individuals or $300 for organizations. Join now or learn more.
Learners' Own Words
"This was a very well put together training and the trainer was well qualified."
"I will use all information in my daily work practice."
"This was a powerfully important training for me!"
Your Training Description
Conflict can be an opportunity to heal relationships and grow into our best selves, and yet much of our society is rooted in punitive approaches to conflict that leave few possibilities for authentic accountability and healing. Even as many youth-serving organizations seek to adopt trauma-informed practices, they often unintentionally continue to perpetuate shame, blame, and punishment through their conflict practices. Transformative approaches to conflict seek to deepen our capacity to understand the needs that drive conflicts and to develop responses that speak to those needs while offering opportunities for meaningful repair.
With transformative practices, you can build your skills to approach conflict directly and humanely, while deepening relationships and finding freedom from the incredible drain that unhealthy conflict causes our communities. Shifting your individual and organizational understanding of conflict can open up the space that youth need to interrupt and mend cycles of violence.
This training will give youth workers techniques for fostering de-escalation, while deepening your understanding of the root causes of challenging behaviors. You’ll practice shifting from reactive responses, often rooted in your own histories of trauma, oppression, and privilege, to centered responses that make room for the unique experiences and needs of the youth in front of you. You’ll reflect on how to shift the practices of your programs away from punitive approaches and towards the individual and collective possibilities of conflict transformation.
Your Learning Objectives
- Explore healing-centered approaches to conflict that are rooted in restorative and transformative justice
- Understand how domination-based binaries of right/wrong, good kids/bad kids, and victim/perpetrator recreate cycles of violence and oppression
- Build skills in trauma-informed approaches to conflict by distinguishing practices of accountability from those of punishment
- Increase understanding of the needs beneath challenging behavior to move from reactions of judgment and blame towards empathic, strengths-based responses
- Explore how to embody a centered and centering presence that can hold boundaries and de-escalate difficult situations
Your Trainer

Briana Herman-Brand, MSW, has been working with youth and adults for 20 years to heal and transform the root causes and impacts of trauma and oppression. Through training, facilitation, and coaching she supports individuals and communities to build skills at the intersections of healing and justice. She is a Lead Teacher with Generative Somatics, conducting courses nationally on trauma healing and embodied leadership for educators, counselors, and social justice leaders. Since 2003, Briana has worked in King County public schools and non-profits, supporting youth to interrupt cycles of violence while building collective power and dignity. For the past 6 years, Briana has been sharing her Trauma-Informed Youth Work framework with providers who want to increase the power and sustainability of their work. Briana has worked extensively in the fields of intimate partner violence, White anti-racism, LGBTQ experience, transformative/restorative justice, and community organizing.
Your Competency Focus Area

Each of YIPA’s trainings are designed around a broad framework of eight youth work competencies. The competency focus of this training is: COMMUNICATIONS.
Gain communication flexibility which allows you to develop healthy, productive work relationships, engage in collaborative problem solving with youth, and improve individual and group facilitation.
Your Training Details
- On-Demand Webinar
- Recorded on Wednesday, November 11, 2020
- 2 hour training
- FREE for YIPA members
- $40 for non-YIPA members
- 97% approval rating
- Not a member? Annual membership is $124 for individuals or $300 for organizations. Join now or learn more.
This training will count as 2 CE hours for most boards. Please contact your board directly with questions on submitting. You are encouraged to print or save this training information as a PDF for your records.