Homegrown Expertise Drives National Conversation on Trauma

May 28, 2026

When professionals from across the country attended the 2026 Complex Trauma Summit, coworkers from Mercy Home for Boys & Girls played a major role in shaping the conversation.

Mercy Home’s Organizational Development team, including Emily Neal, Jeremy Karpen, and Megan Kerndt, helped develop and present two modules about complex trauma in residential and school settings that were featured as part of the summit’s national training curriculum.

Mercy Home’s long history of experience in trauma-informed care was then shared with professionals across the United States working in fields ranging from mental health and education to child welfare, juvenile justice, and law enforcement.

The summit was organized through the Complex Trauma Training Consortium (CTTC), a national workforce development initiative designed to expand access to trauma-informed training and establish sustainable expertise in understanding and responding to complex trauma. It was hosted from May 5–8, but the training sessions were prerecorded by the team earlier.

For Neal, Mercy Home’s involvement in the summit represented both a significant professional achievement and validation of the organization’s long-standing commitment to trauma-informed care.

“It’s really cool that we’re out there on a national level and our wisdom is being shared,” Neal said.

But Mercy Home’s connection to the training consortium traces back more than a decade.

In 2015, Mercy Home adopted the ARC framework (Attachment, Regulation, and Competency) as the foundation of its therapeutic model for working with young people and their families. During that initial implementation process, Mercy Home worked closely with senior ARC trainers from a trauma center in Boston.

“They were impressed with how well we did on the implementation front and knew that we had experienced trainers on staff,” Neal said. “They asked us to be a field site for the complex trauma training series and develop some of the modules based on our expertise.”

Mercy Home’s experience in residential treatment and trauma-informed school training made the organization a natural fit to help create curriculum for this summit.

“We had a lot of materials that we could draw from and create something meaningful,” Neal said.

But the process was far from easy.

“This was a very time-consuming process that took us about three months to put the modules together,” she said. “There were so many iterations because we had to send them in for feedback and make updates.”

In addition to developing the curriculum itself, the Mercy Home team also created detailed teaching notes and trainer guidance designed to help facilitators deliver the material themselves.

““It forced us to really focus and pull together all of the best lessons that we’ve learned on our trauma-informed journey and make it clear enough to be taught by anyone,” Neal said. “That’s pretty cool to have this lasting resource. We got super positive feedback from our trainees because we were very intentional and the visuals were really good.”

For Neal, one of the most meaningful aspects of the project was knowing that the tools that Mercy Home uses, are being implemented across the country.

“There’s a lot of interest from institutions where staff are always looking for new tools and new ways of thinking,” Neal said. “Formal training in trauma-informed approaches can sometimes be expensive or hard to come by.” But since Mercy Home already has these materials and expertise developed, we can be a helpful resource for schools or residential centers.”

As Mercy Home’s training materials continue reaching professionals nationwide, Neal said she takes pride in both the work and the organization’s reputation in the field.

“It is cool that our approach and expertise has been recognized in this way,” Neal said. “We’re thought of as a place that can put together quality learning experiences in the field. I feel proud of what our team put together and the reputation that we’ve built.”

Earlier this spring, Mercy Home was selected to be an exhibitor at the 70th annual conference of the Association of Children’s Residential Centers and gave a presentation on our Home’s model of care, aka, the Mercy Model.