ACT Program Description

The Advanced Clinical Training (ACT) Program in Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health is a 15-month, community learning structured, professional development program designed for professionals who support families caring for children during the prenatal period to age 5 years. The program strives to expand the availability of and access to infant and early childhood mental health (early relational health) services throughout Washington and neighboring states.

ACT was developed utilizing a framework and foundational principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Our curriculum attends to the lived experiences of children (prenatal to 5 years) and their caregivers as whole persons living in a social, cultural, economic, and political contexts built on settler colonization, genocide, enslavement, and their legacy of interlocking and interacting systems of oppression including but not limited to racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia.

The program curriculum, implementation, and administration strive to explicitly and equitably address systemic barriers and gaps in professional development in content and approach. By centering the lived experiences of families and professionals from Black, Indigenous, communities of color, and communities historically and currently targeted for oppression, we make possible the experience of inclusion and belonging to deepen the program’s community relationships and facilitate respect, compassion, relational safety, and healing. When the diversity of professionals is representative of the communities we serve, children and families from those communities are better served and the profession benefits as a whole. We invite you to learn more about the ACT Program’s Core Values.

ACT PROGRAM CURRICULUM