It is important now more than ever to embrace and celebrate what connects us: our resilience. This month, we’re shining a spotlight on Candice Tindell, the Resilience Training and Outreach Manager. Learn more about our Education and Training program, the Resilience Training Institute, and more!
Read our interview with Candice below.
You’re Resilience’s Training and Outreach Manager. Can you tell me about this role and what a typical day looks like for you?
I manage the Resilience Training Institute (RTI), the arm of our Education and Training team that handles, coordinates, and plans all of our professional trainings. Those are trainings we do with adults who tend to be working in fields adjacent to this one, such as advocates, nurses, teachers, lawyers, activists, or organizers. They come to us for information and tools on how to better serve survivors of sexual assault and how to prevent sexual assault. The RTI consists of our 40-hour trainings, our higher education trainings, and we host specialized trainings and CEU trainings for LCPC and LCSW professionals.
A typical day really depends. Some of my days can look like behind-the-scenes coordination and managing of our trainings. That could be making sure they’re on track and that we know our agendas are on track, our trainees are being taken care of, and making sure everyone has what they need. Then, when we’re running a training, I am in that training room. Before the pandemic, that looked like our physical training space; now it’s on Zoom. I’m managing the group dynamics, making sure everyone is where they need to be and everything is on track. After a training, I’m making sure people get their training certificates, or I’m analyzing evaluation data. It really can vary day-to-day, week-to-week, depending on if we’re hosting a training or if we’re preparing to host one.
What inspired you to work with Resilience?
I have always wanted to work in a field focused on gender-based violence, inequality, and social justice. My undergrad degree was Social Work and Women Studies, and my graduate degree is in Nonprofit Management, so when I saw this job posting I felt that it was a really good union between using my business mind, background, and my passion for gender-based violence and social justice. I’m really passionate about the work, and the opportunity to use my skills in this way is really exciting.
The RTI was established in 2018. Can you tell me about how that came to be and how it has grown since then?
I was hired in 2017, and this role was a brand-new position. Resilience foresaw bringing someone on who would be able to take more ownership and grow the training institute, although at the time that wasn’t what we called it. At the time a few other Resilience staff were doing the work that I do now, but no one really had the time to fully develop the professional training department and invest in its growth. After I was hired, we officially created the RTI in 2018 once I had done some work establishing foundational pieces of the institute and asking questions like, what are the objectives of this program? What are the basic offerings of this program? What is it going to look like? How are we going to deliver that program to the community? Through consistent growth, we’ve been able to offer more trainings and bring in more money to serve survivors and support our services. Resilience has been able to offer more diverse offerings. This position got a little bump up to Manager because they wanted me to continue to have ownership over it and have a bit more autonomy to continue that growth in the next couple of years.
All our volunteer medical advocates complete a 60-hour medical volunteer training through RTI. Can you tell me about the role our volunteer medical advocates play in supporting the Resilience community?
Our volunteer medical advocates are essential to our programming and community services. We have 16 partner hospitals, and we are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We have staff advocates at Resilience who do a wonderful job managing caseloads and working long-term with the clients. The volunteer advocates, over the course of that 60-hour training, are trained to respond to our hospitals when we get a call that a survivor in a hospital needs some support throughout that process. Volunteer medical advocates go through a 60-hour, really intense, detailed, highly tailored training for this role and learn how to respond to disclosures and how to provide survivors with their legal and medical options. They get detailed evidence collection kit training and sessions on supporting survivors who might have specialized needs and need additional accommodations. The volunteer medical advocates are the folks who are going out to the emergency room and helping respond to that really high caseload in person with our survivors. They’re essential to our programming, especially for the advocacy program, to ensure that survivors in the hospitals have support when they’re going through a really difficult process and time.
What is something you or the E&T team is looking forward to this year?
I’m hoping that at some point this year we’ll be able to do some sort of in-person training. The virtual training option has been a wonderful and effective alternative throughout the pandemic, and we’re going to continue offering things virtually as it helps training become accessible for people. But we are also hoping at some point — at least at the professional training arm — to have some in-person training again. I’m hoping that happens soon, and I’m looking forward to that possibility. I miss those connections that you would make in-person that are harder to make over Zoom.
I am also looking forward to SAAM (Sexual Assault Awareness Month) this year.
What’s one fun fact about you?
I’ve performed at the House of Blues three times.
What do you want people to know that you haven’t been asked about?
We don’t have it completely ready yet, but we are hoping that we can expand our volunteer offerings with the Education and Training program more robustly. Traditionally, most of our volunteer opportunities are through medical advocacy first, but we’re looking to switch that up. For folks who might not feel comfortable or feel like their strong points wouldn’t be that in-person medical advocacy, but they have really strong presentation skills or outreach skills, we want to create a more robust program for people to volunteer in different capacities. So keep an eye out for when that rolls out because we’re hoping to engage with volunteers more strategically in the Education and Training team.