Atlanta’s Resiliency Resource for Frontline Workers (ARROW)

This three-year grant funds Atlanta’s Resiliency Resource for frontline Workers (ARROW), an initiative to leverage academic-practice partnerships and engage stakeholders in a sustainable and scalable series of interventions to promote mindfulness trainings for the front-line workforce.

ARROW supports 310 front-line workers through evidence-based mindfulness approaches focused on resiliency, compassion, and spiritual health.

ARROW is facilitated by partnerships with Grady Health System, Emory University, and Emory Health System Police and Public Safety Departments. In this partnership, ARROW team members will introduce front line workers to evidence-based mindfulness approaches, support advocates within their workplaces to become mindfulness coaches using a train the trainer approach and retool interdisciplinary course offerings at Emory to build resiliency and strengthen resolve among front-line workers, particularly across medically underserved communities in Atlanta. ARROW will bolster, and complement, existing peer support and system wide resources at our practice partners’ organizations.

Another core component of ARROW is implementing a scalable curriculum which aims to empower clinicians in training to develop and apply the skills needed to mitigate burnout they themselves, or their peers, may experience in their future work. Collectively, ARROW is the product of faculty content experts and staff from not only the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, but also The School of Medicine, Rollins School for Public Health, and Spiritual Health within the Woodruff Health Science Center.

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Our ARROW team is providing front line workers within healthcare systems across Atlanta opportunities to participate in learning how to utilize mindfulness and compassion-based skills from the Community Resiliency Model^(R),  Cognitively Based Compassion Training^(R), and the Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health^TM programs. These are evidence-based interventions that have been shown to improve wellbeing and impact underlying neural activity tied to improved participant-reported outcomes. In addition to providing access to regularly occurring training opportunities, ARROW is leveraging federal funding to ensure that individuals within the healthcare systems are supported to become certified trainers in these evidence-based mindfulness interventions. This train-the-trainer approach will enhance the sustainability of ARROW.