Friday Connection – TACFS Members

TBRI Fridays are back! Except——we are starting fresh! Welcome to the Friday Connection!  Our focus is still the same–Trauma Informed Care. However, this year, we won’t just be focusing on TBRI exclusively, but we will bring in guest speakers to educate the audience on best practices and approaches to trauma informed care across various populations.  Chelsy Alexander and Andrea Requenes will still be facilitating the dialogue and keeping the peer learning going and they have been counting down since last year!

Connection is the foundation to any trauma informed practice. How can we do that if we aren’t starting with ourselves? Join us every last Friday of the month with a guest speaker(or two) to connect with your peers, connect with your team, and connect with amazing leaders in the trauma informed practice space.

This month, we will have the privilege of hearing from two dynamic leaders who advocate and work closely with providers who work with youth who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation. Please meet TACFS’s CSEY Project Manager, Sarah Hall and a Very Special Guest Ali Shepherd, Director of Survivor Advocacy at Unbound Waco. Both women bring a strong background in supporting youth who have experienced trauma and we are thrilled to have them leading the conversation.

Sarah Hall joined TACFS in 2021 as the Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth (CSEY) Project Coordinator. In her role at TACFS, Sarah is working to help our member organizations build capacity to provide more direct care services to youth who have undergone commercial sexual exploitation and to increase CSEY prevention services throughout the state. As an expert and survivor of Human Trafficking, Sarah’s lends her support to service provider organizations by designing, coordinating, and facilitating trauma-responsive trainings for youth-serving professionals, with a particular focus on preventing, identifying, and responding to youth commercial sexual exploitation.

Ali Shepherd currently serves as the Director of Survivor Advocacy for Unbound Now in Waco, Texas where she oversees their 24/7 Crisis Response and Referral line and supervises a team of advocates providing comprehensive case management and emotional and moral support to minor and adult survivors of human trafficking. Ali’s experience working in outpatient substance use treatment deeply impacted her and led to a desire to learn more about the effects of trauma and providing trauma informed care. After earning her Master of Social Work degree from Baylor University, she joined Unbound Now where she works alongside other passionate professionals committed to fulfilling their organization’s mission to support survivors and resource communities to fight human trafficking. Ali is licensed in Texas as a Master Social Worker and Chemical Dependency Counselor and desires to be a compassionate help and presence to others on their personal journey of recovery and healing.

Bring yourself and your team and we will see you at 9am on Friday, February 24!