LEGACY BUILDING
IN SOCIAL WORK:

Elizabeth (Liz) Lanter has a worked with at-risk youth of all ages since 2005 in various settings (child welfare, school, group home, etc). She serendipitously learned about Infant Mental Health through her macro practice internship placement at Children’s Hospital of WI. This sparked a new found passion in her career as she realized that working with a younger population can help prevent so many of the social issues that she had previously worked on, as quality relationship building serves as the root cause, and the social issues (such as child abuse/neglect, teen pregnancy, crime, etc) is the symptom of a lesser quality parent-child relationship. While working in child welfare, she learned about the direct service approach of "Trauma Informed Care." Since then, Liz has worked to meld these two fields, that have historically had little to no direct overlap in training and approach, as Liz believes that they are essentially one in the same. Liz has a post-master's certificate in Infant Mental Health (IMH), Early Childhood and Family Studies; post master's certificate in Trauma Informed Counseling; training and mentorship by Dr. Connie Lillas regarding IMH and Neuro-relational Framework; and completed 18 month Trauma Informed Child and Parent Psychology training. She has a passion to use the theoretical and practice experiences gained in her career to fuel her "big picture thinking" and system changes in the fields of trauma and early prevention. She has held roles as an IMH Specialist for Healthy Infant Court, Steering Committee Member and Executive Committee Member for Milwaukee County’s Healthy Infant Court, a one of a kind court program in America. She has previous experience as a grants review committee for CAP Fund. She is passionate about sharing this knowledge with others to influence change in their own practices, and potentially spark their interest in systemic changes. She has presented at numerous local and state level conferences discussing IMH in the child welfare system and trauma. She presented with Dr. Connie Lillas at the 2016 World Association of IMH regarding NRF work in Milwaukee County. Liz burned out from the stressful work of being a therapist in child welfare and managing her own blended family. She refocused herself and decided to move closer towards her desire to make the knowledge of trauma informed care and emotional development a universal intervention approach, as we all experience emotional development in infancy and we all are susceptible to trauma in our lifetime.