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DSD Service System · Practice
What early adversity does over a lifetime, why people with disabilities carry more of it, what protective factors actually are, and how a service can respond without making a person tell the story again.
45–50 minutes · 4 lessons · Voluntary learning
Understand what early adversity does over a lifetime and why people with disabilities carry more of it.
Learn what protective factors are, what resilience actually means, and how to tell either from a demand that the person cope.
Learn when a process asks a person to disclose adversity without a purpose, and how to redesign the question.
Review what your process asks about adversity and change one question.
Look at one intake or assessment form you use and find every question that asks about adversity; for each, write down what the answer changes.
A large share of the people the Division serves have lives that include early adversity: abuse, neglect, household instability, institutional placement, and the specific adversities that come with growing up disabled in a world not built for it. Research on early adversity is now well known, and it is often applied badly: as a score, as a screening question asked at intake, as a reason. This module covers what early adversity does over a lifetime, why people with disabilities carry more of it, what protective factors and resilience actually mean, and how a service can respond well without requiring the person to tell the story again. Nothing here is scored, ranked or collected.
A question about a person's past is justified when the answer changes what the service does. Otherwise it is a cost with no purpose, paid by the person.
Respond to early adversity by protecting the factors that reduce its effects and by asking only what the service will act on.
Run the intake review on one form and send one changed question to its owner.
Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
Federal public health information on early adversity, its effects, and prevention.
Accessible description of protective factors and how resilience is produced.
Federal guidance on trauma-informed principles for organizations and services.
State program information on services for Minnesotans with disabilities.
Research on the elevated rates of abuse and violence experienced by people with disabilities.
State council offering guidance and technical assistance on disability access and policy in Minnesota.