Lakeside Educational Network has become a leader in region- and state-wide trauma training and helping students impacted by adversity and trauma. Thanks to a dedicated staff, our reputation as experts in our field have grown substantially. In fact, we have trained over 70,000 professionals who are providing support to trauma-impacted children and adults.
In our years of curriculum and professional practice development, we have established exhaustive curriculum in trauma and related topics. Our research encompasses over 2,500 resources and our impact to individuals and systems of care has been positively pervasive.
In spite of our expansive outreach, we recognize that there are still many individuals who are not aware of how trauma impacts their lives and the lives of their families. Mental health training has not been accessible to many individuals within our culture and there continues to be a mental health crisis that is escalating among our youth and families.
As we have experienced extensive funding cuts even for training, I have come to realize that the potential for traditional training opportunities have decreased. This calls for a new approach that is more contextual to our average population of users and can leverage some of the technological advances that will be available with virtual reality training and the upcoming five-trillion-dollar AI industry.
It is for that reason that Lakeside has established Lakeside Metaverse, a new avatar- and AI-based training environment that will soon be available to our entire population of app users. We have now completed development of our Intro to Trauma course which has been in production for several months. This course will soon be made available free of charge to any internet user and will undergird a community of trauma-informed individuals that we are currently establishing.
This course will be the beginning of a larger group of trainings offered in Lakeside Metaverse. We have built our own app that is available on Meta, where we will take the rich content of Lakeside’s training curriculum to build programs for teenagers, parents, veterans, healthcare professionals, business professionals, educators, early childhood professionals and many others. These programs will be available to our entire society for the same kind of subscription fees that are currently in use for movies, gaming and other types of media.
In just a few weeks we will be announcing how anyone can access this course which has been well-acclaimed as one of the leading Trauma 101 courses in the training world. We are excited to offer this opportunity to our country to encourage everyone to have access to well-researched mental health training. Stay tuned for my next posts about this exciting new development.
Gerry Vassar
President/CEO
