Martha Holden
Project Director, Residential Child Care Project
2009
FLDC

Web Bio Page

Current Activities

Current Professional Activities
Martha J. Holden is a Senior Extension Associate with the Family Life Development Center and the director of the Residential Child Care Project. As project director, she provides technical assistance to residential child caring agencies in implementing a best practice program, a train-the-trainer program in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention to residential child care staff, training programs in violence prevention, a program in the Investigation of Institutional Maltreatment, and a program in Institutional Assessment, throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Israel, New Zealand, and Russia.

As director of the RCCP, Ms Holden seeks to maintain a leadership role in developing innovative programs to enable child caring agencies to serve children, youth, and families more effectively by building strong linkages among research, outreach activities, and evaluation efforts. These relationships are viewed as cyclical: research leads to the development of innovative and effective outreach programs, which are carefully evaluated. Evaluation activities contribute directly to the adaptation and improvement of outreach programs and may also contribute to new research. In 2007, the RCCP was awarded the Human Ecology Extension, Outreach, and Public Service Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Extension/Outreach.

The Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI), Child And Residential Experiences (CARE), and the Institutional Abuse (IAB) components are the main components of the project.  The RCCP’s TCI component works directly with child caring and educational organizations seeking to lower rates of aggressive incidents and high-risk physical interventions.  The RCCP’s CARE component is a multi-level practice model that involves providing residential child care personnel with the capacity to implement a set of core practice principles that are solidly grounded in current social science literature and best practices standards and facilitating organizational changes to support and sustain the implementation of those core principles at all levels of the organization. In addition CARE is in the process of being evaluated using a sophisticated quasi-experimental design in North and South Carolina. The RCCP’s IAB component works with state and local authorities to train child protection professionals to prevent and remediate institutional maltreatment.




Biography

Biographical Statement
Martha J. Holden is a Senior Extension Associate with the Family Life Development Center and the director of the Residential Child Care Project. As project director, she provides technical assistance to implement and best practice model for residential child caring agencies, a train-the-trainer program in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention to residential child care supervisory staff, training programs in violence prevention, a program in the Investigation of Institutional Maltreatment, and a program in Institutional Assessment, throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Israel, and Russia. In 1975 Ms. Holden received her M.S. in Mental Health Counseling from Wright State University. She was the lead editor and writer in the 2009 re-development of the Center's Therapeutic Crisis Intervention curriculum, Edition 6, in use from 1982 and the author of the book, Children and Residential Experiences (CARE): Creating Conditions for Change, a best practice model for residential care organizations.

Ms Holden has published in the Children and Youth Services Review, Child Abuse and Neglect: An International Journal, Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Problems, Residential Treatment for Children & Youth, and the Journal of Child And Youth Care Work. She has co-authored a chapter in the book Understanding Abusive Families and For Your Own Safety: Examining the Safety of High Risk Interventions for Children and Young People. In addition to her extensive experience in training and curriculum development, Ms Holden served as an administrator of a residential child care facility overseeing the day to day operation of a residential treatment facility for children, including its education resources from 1979 - 1988. Throughout her career, Ms. Holden has been studying ways to prevent the occurrence of institutional abuse of children through training, investigating and influencing organizational culture.

Keywords
children institutional care, group homes for children, restraint reduction, preventing institutional abuse, program models for residential care

Courses, Websites, Pubs

Selected Publications
Holden, M.J. (2009). Children and residential experiences: Creating the conditions for change. Washington, D.C.: Child Welfare League of America.

Holden, M. J., & Curry, D. (2008). Learning from the research. In M.A. Nuuno, D.M. Day, & L.B. Bullard (Eds.), For our own safety: Examining the safety of high risk interventions for children and young people (pp. 107-126). Arlington, VA: Child Welfare League of America.

Nunno, M.A., Holden, M. J., & Tollar, A. (2006). Learning from tragedy: A survey of child and adolescent restraint fatalities. Child Abuse & Neglect:  An International Journal, 30 (12), 1333-1342.

Nunno, M. A., Holden, M. J., & Leidy, B. (2003). Evaluating and monitoring the impact of a crisis intervention system on a residential child care facility, Children and Youth Services Review, 25(4). 295-315.