Napa Valley Wellness Conference

Participants will gain 1) A deeper connection between emotional balance, mindsets, and stress response. 2) Understanding how Protective and Cultural Patterns influence equity, cultural responsiveness, and bias. 3) Open Educational Resources (OER) that teach skills in Centering, Connection, and Collaboration.

In this session, participants will explore the essential components for establishing and maintaining effective, sustainable school-based wellness programs that support both students and staff. Using the Appreciative Inquiry framework, attendees will engage in a collaborative process to envision a wellness program implementation model, along with actionable best practices that can be tailored to any school community. This interactive session will guide participants through strategies for embedding wellness into the school culture, ensuring that mental health, well-being, and long-term support are prioritized for both educators and students. Participants will leave with a clear vision and concrete steps for fostering a school environment that promotes lasting wellness for all.

Learning Goals and Takeaways:
1. Attendees will actively participate in using the Appreciative Inquiry framework to design a customized wellness program model for their school or district.
2. Participants will learn the essential elements needed to create effective, long-lasting wellness programs that support both students and staff.
3. Participants will leave with actionable best practices and strategies for embedding wellness into the fabric of their school culture, making it adaptable to their specific educational environment.
4. Attendees will be guided through creating a sustainable vision for wellness in their schools, with a focus on fostering mental health and well-being over the long term for both educators and students.

This presentation will focus on strategically building and sustaining effective school-based wellness programs prioritizing mental health, racial equity, and youth empowerment. By bringing together best practices from school-based clinicians and administrators, we will explore innovative strategies that schools can use to address both the emotional and social needs of their students, especially in marginalized communities affected by trauma. Attendees will also learn how to actively engage youth voices and tackle the mental health stigma among students of color while leveraging new methods to expand services that address the social determinants of health. Presenting bold, innovative strategies will inspire schools to re-imagine how they support the mental well-being of all students, creating more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable communities.

Our session will highlight and discuss how both a mental health clinician and district social worker have been able to partner with school sites to increase school attendance and navigate school refusal/truancy. Anticipated take-away will be an understanding of the intersection between mental health and it's impact on school attendance and concrete strategies for partnering with families, students and school sites.

1. Inspire Innovative Thinking: Encourage participants to question traditional methods and explore creative, out-of-the-box strategies for supporting students.

2. Understand TIC: Provide a comprehensive overview of Trauma-Informed Care, including its principles, benefits, and the crucial role it plays in the classroom.

3. Advocate for TIC Certification: Discuss the importance of TIC certification for educators, alongside first aid and CPR, and why it should be a priority in California and beyond.

4. Practical Application: Share actionable strategies for integrating TIC practices into daily routines, creating a safer and more supportive environment for all students.

5. Call to Action: Motivate educators to take the next steps in advocating for and obtaining TIC certification, thereby becoming champions for their students' well-being.

Employees in community behavioral health and education settings are regularly exposed to traumatic material. Students and clients carry trauma exposure ranging from difficult school transitions, immigration traumas, and intrafamilial violence. This manifests in school and treatment settings in increased mental health struggles and often problematic behaviors including but not limited to violence. Holding space for students and clients amidst their trauma response undoubtedly affects the good people working with them. Witnessing matriculated struggles, managing to keep milieus safe, and witnessing treatment and/or education “failures” can be a heavy weight for professionals to carry. Many training courses in trauma exposure focus on defining compassion fatigue, secondary and vicarious trauma, and exploring elements of self-care. This interactive presentation will focus on building a community of care and developing intention in navigating trauma affected systems to a place of post traumatic growth.

Presentation objectives:
• Understand what makes a trauma affected system
• Understand the difference between sustained trauma exposure in systems and single incident trauma
• Understand how trauma exposure effects professionals in trauma affected systems
• Understand meaning making and post traumatic growth
• Discuss and explore intentional strategies of self-care, and to build communities of care

• Participants will learn the background of Dynamic Mindfulness (DMind), a research-validated, trauma-informed, movement-based mindfulness practice. 
• Participants will have the option to join in an experiential practice of Dynamic Mindfulness, which includes moving the body, breathing intentionally and centering the mind. 
• Participants will learn how DMind  builds stress resilience and enhances emotion regulation in themselves and their students.  
• Participants will learn strategies for how to integrate Dynamic Mindfulness into their workplace, school and classroom settings.  
• Participants will walk away with a new set of tools to reduce stress in their personal and professional lives.  

Quality supervision leads to quality mental health services. Learn best practices for supervising school-based mental health staff who provide tiers II and III services. Gain tips and strategies for supporting staff growth, monitoring service fidelity, and maintaining quality supervision during the busy school year.

In this workshop, participants will engage in a social emotional arts and theatre-based approach to explore stress and its effect on the body, identify their own stressors, experience different ways to become aware of their stressors, and practice tools and exercises for regulating the nervous system.

• Utilizes theatre and social emotional arts and learning to give adults experiential learning and opportunities to practice regulating themselves and co-regulating others.
• Promotes destigmatizing and understanding stress through theatrical, experiential, and social emotional learning.
• Engages participants in regulation activities and practice teaching these activities to co-regulate young people or adults. All regulatory practices are grounded in science.
• Explores our individual brains and bodies and how they react to stress to become aware of when self-regulation is needed.

This workshop utilizes group drumming for regulation and to build core strengths such as focusing and listening, team building, leadership, expressing feelings, managing anger/stress, empathy, and gratitude. These practices come from the evidence-based Beat the Odds® program.

Participants will learn about the importance of the peer-led model, hear from youth mental health advocates, and participate in a variety of wellness activities hosted by students. Participants will also learn about Bring Change to Mind (BC2M) and our resources for our mental health awareness clubs in high schools across the country, including Napa, CA.

This 75-minute workshop will provide school-based mental health professionals and administrators with a comprehensive framework for building sustainable wellness programs that actively engage student leadership. Focusing on reducing mental health stigma and addressing racial inequities, this session will offer practical examples and evidence-based strategies to create culturally responsive mental health initiatives in schools. Participants will explore how to address racial trauma, integrate social determinants of health, and create systems that support all students, particularly those from marginalized communities.

By the end of the workshop, participants will:

1. Gain insight into how mental health stigma affects student well-being and understand the importance of student leadership in reducing this stigma.
2. Learn best practices for developing sustainable, student-centered wellness programs that address racial inequities in school-based mental health services.
3. Understand how to address racial trauma in students and incorporate culturally responsive practices into their wellness initiatives.
4. Explore strategies for integrating social determinants of health into wellness programming, expanding services to better support diverse student needs.

Participants will:​
- Walk through the four steps to guide the implementation or improvement of staff relaxation zones at schools or across districts. (1)Set a goal, (2)make a plan, (3)take action, and (4)sustain and evaluate.​
- Learn best practices and see examples to inform their plans. ​
- Receive tips to support equitable access to established relaxation zones.​

​Core Concept: ​
Staff Relaxation Zone – a space like a staff lounge or break room that is boundaried and intentionally set up for all staff to relax, decompress and attend to their wellbeing.​

Participants in this workshop will learn more about the California Peer Run Warm Line’s unique service, which empowers individuals to seek help on their own terms and is available 24/7 and statewide to callers of all ages.  

Individuals who contact the CA Warm Line seek support for a wide variety of issues, including anxiety, panic, depression, hearing voices, and other mental health experiences; feelings of isolation and loneliness, challenges in interpersonal relationships, substance use, and the impacts of current events including the pandemic.

Unlike many crisis services, the CA Warm Line is a completely voluntary and self-directed resource, allowing individuals to reach out on their own terms without fear of being forced into clinical interventions.

People choose the CA Warm Line because they feel understood and validated by trained counselors who have lived experience with mental health challenges, creating connection through empathy, mutuality, active listening, and reflecting that their stories and feelings matter.

Audience members will feel prepared to use our service for themselves, to share the resource with others, and integrate our values into how they understand mental health resources. We hope this presentation will be valuable in discussions with family, friends, classmates, coworkers, and their larger communities for years to come!