Sandra L. Bloom, M.D.

Sandra Bloom, M.D.  is a Board-Certified psychiatrist, graduate of Temple University School of Medicine and was awarded the Temple University School of Medicine Alumni Achievement Award. Dr. Bloom currently serves as Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and in 2016 received the Public Health Practice Award from her school. She serves as Senior Advisor to the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice. She is President of CommunityWorks, an organizational consulting firm committed to the development of nonviolent environments. Dr. Bloom is a Past-President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and presently co-chairs the ACEs Task Force for Philadelphia as well as the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice, based in Washington, D.C.

 From 1980-2001, Dr. Bloom served as Founder and Executive Director of the Sanctuary programs, inpatient psychiatric programs for the treatment of trauma-related emotional disorders. Over 350 programs have been trained in the Sanctuary Model®. The Sanctuary Model® is now being applied in residential and multi-service treatment programs for children, inpatient mental health programs, schools, domestic violence shelters, group homes, and homeless shelters. Since 2001, Dr. Bloom has consulted with a wide variety of social service and mental health programs to introduce the Sanctuary Model as a blueprint for organizational change. From 2005-2016 she was co-founder and developer of the Sanctuary Model training and implementation process of the Sanctuary Institute. During her tenure, over 350 programs were trained nationally and internationally. 

Dr. Bloom is author or co-author of a  series of books on trauma-informed care.  Her first book, Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies, now in a second edition, tells the story of the journey she and her colleagues began in the 1980’s in understanding the connections between a wide variety of emotional disturbances and the legacy of child abuse and other forms of traumatic exposure. Her second, co-authored book, Bearing Witness : Violence and Collective Responsibility,published in 1998, was the first book devoted to looking at the deep and wide connections between trauma and public health. Her third and fourth books, also co-authored, were published by Oxford University Press in 2010 and 2013 and focus on the evolution and development of the Sanctuary Model, one dealing with the effects of organizational stress on our helping systems, titled Destroying Sanctuary: The Crisis in Human Service Delivery Systems and the other, titled  Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Organizations. She has also published a number of articles and chapters available on her website, www.sanctuaryweb.com.

From 1980-2001, Dr. Bloom served as Founder and Executive Director of the Sanctuary programs, inpatient psychiatric programs for the treatment of trauma-related emotional disorders. Her first book, Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies described the experience of her colleagues and herself as they learned what it means to treat adults who suffer from complex, trauma-related problems and what it takes to create trauma-informed systems.

Book Reviews: Robbins Book Review, 1998 Tandy Book Review Creating Sanctuary.pdf

In 2013, Routledge published a second edition of the original 1997 work, Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies  with updates from Dr. Bloom reviewing the last fifteen years of development in the field and the story of what happened to the Sanctuary programs after 1997.

In her second book, Bearing Witness: Trauma and Collective Responsibility, Dr. Bloom described the need for a public health approach to the issue of violence, recognizing that all forms of violence are interconnected, posing multiple and significant threats to continuing survival.  

 This book offers a unique layperson’s introduction to the scope and causes of violence and trauma theory and suggests ways we can all work to attack these causes. Upon completing this work, you will have a better understanding of the social causes of the violence epidemic and concrete suggestions for its long-term control.

Bearing Witness addresses the cycle of violence by discussing some of the biological, psychological, social, and moral issues that go into determining whether a person will end up as a victim, perpetrator, or bystander to violent events and what happens to us when we are in one or all three of these roles. The authors look at a number of intersecting factors that play interdependent roles in creating a culture that promotes, supports, and even encourages violence. Specifically, you’ll gain invaluable insight into:

• trauma theory and traumatogenic forces--backdrops against which the chances of exposure to violence and the use of violence as a problemsolver are increased

• normal human development in the context of attachment theory and what occurs as a result of disrupted attachment bonds

• how rapid changes in modern society and the breakdown of the traditional family structure contribute to a level of social stress that promotes violence

• violence in the family, in the workplace, and in the schools--all places to which people turn for security

• social responses to violence--the ways in which certain responses decrease or increase the likelihood of violence

• the unhealthy balance of power between the genders and how violence or the threat of violence maintains this imbalance

• how our cultural standard of disavowing our normal emotional experience sets the stage for repeated and regular empathic failure, which leads to violence

A framework for understanding the various aspects of the problem of violence, Bearing Witness delves into the various aspects of trauma--what trauma does to the body, the mind, the emotions, and relationships--before beginning to formulate proposals for initiating processes that lead to problem-solving. Once this knowledge base has been established, the authors give you the beginnings of an outline for reorganizing society with the aim of establishing a community that is responsive to the basic human need for safety and peace.

The second part of the trilogy on the Sanctuary Model, co-authored by Brian Farragher, is titled Destroying Sanctuary: The Crisis in Human Service Delivery Systems and was published by Oxford University Press. For the last thirty years, the nation's mental health and social service systems have been under relentless assault, with dramatically rising costs and the fragmentation of service delivery rendering them incapable of ensuring the safety, security, and recovery of their clients. The resulting organizational trauma both mirrors and magnifies the trauma-related problems their clients seek relief from. Just as the lives of people exposed to chronic trauma and abuse become organized around the traumatic experience, so too have our social service systems become organized around the recurrent stress of trying to do more under greater pressure: they become crisis-oriented, authoritarian, disempowered, and demoralized, often living in the present moment, haunted by the past, and unable to plan for the future.

Bennington-Davis Book Review

Published by Oxford University Press in 2013, Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma-Informed Systems of Care represents the third part of this trilogy of books that chronicle the revolutionary changes in our mental health and human service delivery systems that have conspired to disempower staff and hinder client recovery. Creating Sanctuary documented the evolution of The Sanctuary Model therapeutic approach as an antidote to the personal and social trauma that clients bring to child welfare agencies, psychiatric hospitals, and residential facilities. Destroying Sanctuary details the destructive role of organizational trauma in the nation's systems of care. Restoring Sanctuary is a user-friendly manual for organizational change that addresses the deep roots of toxic stress and illustrates how to transform a dysfunctional human service system into a safe, secure, trauma-informed environment.

At its heart, The Sanctuary Model represents an organizational value system that is committed to seven principles, which serve as anchors for decision making at all levels: non-violence, emotional intelligence, social learning, democracy, open communication, social responsibility, and growth and change. The Sanctuary Model is not a clinical intervention; rather, it is a method for creating an organizational culture that can more effectively provide a cohesive context within which healing from psychological and socially derived forms of traumatic experience can be addressed. Chapters are organized around the seven Sanctuary commitments, providing step-by-step, realistic guidance on creating and sustaining fundamental change.

Restoring Sanctuary is a road map to recovery for our nation's systems of care. It explores the notion that organizations are living systems themselves and as such they manifest various degrees of health and dysfunction, analogous to those of individuals. Becoming a truly trauma-informed system therefore requires a process of reconstitution within helping organizations, top to bottom. A system cannot be truly trauma-informed unless the system can create and sustain a process of understanding itself.

2017 CV Dr. Sandra Bloom

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Joseph F. Foderaro, L.C.S.W.

Joseph F. Foderaro, LCSW, BCD received his M.S.S. degree from Bryn Mawr School of Social Work in 1976 and served as Program Director and Co-Founder of the Sanctuary programs from 1980-2001. He also co-founded the Alliance for Creative Development, a multidisciplinary private practice and management company, where he conducted a private practice between 1980 and 2001. He has been a field instructor and supervisor for the Bryn Mawr School of Social Work, the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, and the Marywood School of Social Work. He currently has a private practice in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, serves as a management consultant for CommunityWorks* and is on the faculty of the Sanctuary Institute. He co-authored with Sandra Bloom and RuthAnn Ryan, a group psychoeducation manual titled, S.E.L.F.: A Trauma-Informed Psychoeducational Group Curriculum and has been training staff from domestic violence shelters, parenting programs, and homeless shelters in the use of this curriculum, as well as consulting with a variety of mental health and social service settings. He has taught the S.E.L.F. Group curriculum widely and is involved with introducing S.E.L.F. to various settings in Baltimore. 

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Ruth Ann Ryan, M.S.N.

Ruth Ann Ryan, APRN, BC is a Clinical Nurse Specialist and is a Co- founder of the Sanctuary Programs from 1980-2001. She served as Program Director and as a senior clinician of the Sanctuary. She and her colleagues developed the S.E.L.F. Model of trauma recovery, which has been implemented in treatment programs for children, adolescents and adults in many locations in the United States and Canada. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Pennsylvania and has over 30 years experience in the mental health field. She currently maintains a psychotherapy practice in the Philadelphia suburbs specializing in trauma treatment and is a CommunityWorks organizational consultant SELF principles and practices to social service agencies and treatment facilities throughout the country, as well as serving on the Sanctuary Institute faculty. She recently co-authored with Sandra Bloom and Joseph Foderaro, a group manual titled, S.E.L.F.: A Trauma-Informed Psychoeducational Group Curriculum and has been training staff from domestic violence shelters, parenting programs, and homeless shelters in the use of this curriculum, as well as the staff of the Healing Hurt People program at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children and at Hahnemann Hospital both in Philadelphia. RuthAnn is part of the staff at the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice.

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Lyndra Bills

Lyndra J. Bills, M.D. is a board certified psychiatrist who completed medical school at the University of Texas in San Antonio and a medicine/psychiatry residency at West Virginia University.  She also completed a one year fellowship in post-traumatic stress at West Virginia University.  She implemented the Sanctuary Model working in a West Virginia state hospital and then moved to Pennsylvania to join the founder of the Sanctuary Model, Dr. Sandra Bloom, in 1994.  Dr. Bills served as the Medical Director of the Sanctuary program at Friends Hospital in Philadelphia, PA from 1996-1999. She continues to serve as a faculty member of the Sanctuary Institute as a resource for supervision, training, and consultation.  She also developed Trauma Art Narrative Therapy as a creative cognitive behavioral trauma resolution technique. Dr. Bills began using and developing Trauma Art Narrative Therapy in 1993 as a way to help individuals to process traumatic events. Other interests include horses, dogs, and chasing cows (while riding a horse). Dr. Bills is currently an Associate Medical Director for Community Cares Behavioral Health.

Beverly Haas

For twenty years, Ms. Haas was the Administrator of The Alliance for Creative Development, a multi-disciplinary group psychiatric practice directed by Dr. Sandra Bloom and has managed several specialty healthcare practices in the Lehigh Valley. Beverly is a Certified Medical Manager and founding member of the local chapter of the Professional Association of Healthcare Office Management and Treasurer of the Physicians Office Management Association. Although relocated to Florida, Beverly still provides administrative assistance to CommunityWorks and Dr. Sandra Bloom

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Sarah Yanosy, L.C.S.W.

In 2005 Sarah M. Yanosy began her tenure as the founding Director of the Sanctuary Institute where she served until 2016. Under her leadership, she collaborated with Dr. Sandra Bloom and colleagues to develop the curriculum for the Sanctuary Institute training, and has supervised the training and consultation process for over 350 organizations nationally and internationally to implement the Sanctuary Model. She was recognized as one of the Business Council of Westchester's "40 under 40 Stars". She has been a clinical social worker for over twenty years and had previously used the Sanctuary Model with her treatment team in that capacity. 

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Brian Farragher, L.C.S.W., M.B.A.

Brian Farragher has the distinction of becoming the 4th Executive Director during Hanna Boys Center 69 years of service. He was welcomed to Hanna Boys Center by the board, boys, staff and community on April 25, 2014. Brian earned a Masters of Business Administration from the Hagan School of Business at Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, and a Masters of Social Work from Fordham University School of Social Work, New York, NY. Brian is a 30-year veteran of managing residential treatment centers. His most recent post was as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at the Andrus Children’s Center where he had oversight of all agency programs, facility operations and human resources with annual budget of $31,000,000 over 400 staff and 14 program sites. He also led the development of the Sanctuary Institute, a training and consultation service. The Institute focused on replicating the Sanctuary Model, a trauma-informed system of care. Brian has served as a presenter at regional, national and international conferences. He has co-authored 2 books with Dr. Sandra Bloom entitled Destroying Sanctuary: The Crisis in Human Service Delivery Systems and Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma Informed Systems of Care. He is also the author of many articles on developing trauma-sensitive treatment programs and reducing the use of physical interventions in residential settings.In January 2009, Brian received the Samuel Gerson Nordlinger Child Welfare Leadership Award, presented by the Alliance for Children and Families, to recognize individuals who make outstanding contributions to the child welfare field or the national public policy process to advance quality services for children and families.

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David McCorkle, LCSW

David McCorkle, LCSW maintains a private practice in New York City and is an EMDR Trained Therapist. He has utilized Trauma Art Therapy combined with EMDR for children. He was coordinator for The Sanctuary Model’sâ initial implementation at the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services and the Andrus Children’s Center in Yonkers, New York. He co-coordinated the NIMH Research Project of the Sanctuary Model with Columbia University and research staff at JBFCS’s Residential Programs in Hawthorne, New York. He has six articles on various aspects of the model (Psychiatric Quarterly, Vol 74, No 2, Summer 2003, Sanctuary in a domestic violence shelter: A team approach to healing, January 20003; The INTERNATIONAL Journal for Therapeutic and Supportive Organizations 26 (1), 2005; Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, Vol. 21, No 5, October 2004). He co-wrote a chapter on traumatic losses in the book, Loss, Hurt and Hope. He is the co-author of two of the Sanctuary Psychoed Curriculums, Learning SELF Through Films and the Youth Training Manual: Learning From Our Heroes. As a Senior Faculty member at the Sanctuary Institute, he has consulted with fifteen agencies and four school districts across the United States, Malta, Northern Ireland and Scotland. He has worked with domestic violence, homeless and migrant shelters, four psychiatric hospitals, residential treatment centers, schools, agency coalitions, and community mental health and family support centers. He has been a key note speaker at the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care and has presented on Nonviolence and Conflict Resolution. David and his training partner, Beatriz Vides are often in David’s home state of North Carolina including the Crossnore School and Children’s Home. At Crossnore, David and the Crossnore Trainers devised a Train the Trainer model including the use of Equine Therapy Horses. David is a veteran Broadway performer and uses theater techniques in staff training and team building. He was a Board member of Creative Alternatives of New York, an agency that provides therapeutic theater groups to special populations. In 2015, he received CANY’s Lifetime Achievement Award for over twenty years of Service as Board Member and promoting creative therapy in agencies in New York City. His most recent performances are with Caroline Borderies Shadow Puppet Theater at Stonybrook University’s Charles B. Wang Center.

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Beatriz Vides

Beatriz Vides has been a faculty member of the Sanctuary Institute for nine years. She was the Director of Child Care Services at Astor Services for Children and Families. As a veteran of 15 years of work in Residential Treatment, she has achieved prominence in adapting the theories of the Sanctuary Model into daily practice in various settings.

In addition to her 30 years of working with children and families in the inner city of New York and in rural upstate New York, she has been an evaluator and consultant at medical and psychiatric hospitals, residential programs, school systems and community mental health programs throughout the United Sates. She has been the specialist and coordinator for creating trauma informed schools in the Hyde Park School District as well as other schools in upstate New York, Westchester, Peekskill, New York City and North Carolina. Her international work includes Nepal and South Africa. Her work in creating healing communities was formed from her own story of resilience and survival as a child during the civil war in El Salvador and her subsequent migration to the United States. She is sought after as a trainer who uses experiential methods and creativity to create a learning community. She is also active in the rescuing of abused and neglected animals. She has a B.A. from Hunter College and SUNY with additional graduate work at SUNY.

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