Samantha Farris is a Regional Training Specialist at the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development (KPICD). She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her husband Kyle, where they are foster parents and where Samantha also works at Western Michigan University’s Children’s Trauma Assessment Center (CTAC). Samantha is passionate about supporting Trust-Based Relational Intervention® (TBRI®) implementation across systems of care. Samantha is a clinical social worker and serves as an assessment and treatment clinician on CTAC’s transdisciplinary team, to support children and families whom have often experienced developmental and intergenerational trauma, and are involved in the child welfare and/or juvenile justice systems and treatment courts.
Samantha is endorsed through the Michigan Association of Infant Mental Health in Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health, and utilizes TBRI® and Theraplay® to repair and strengthen attachment between children and their caregivers, facilitate healing from relational trauma, and enhance familial resiliency and community care. Samantha is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Western Michigan University to further deconstruct the systems that create and perpetuate traumatization and insecure attachment on a systemic level. She received her Bachelors in Social Work from Hope College, and her Masters in Social Work from Western Michigan University.