Heather Phillips
Research Director at The National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health
For the past 14 years, Heather Phillips, MA has explored substance use, mental health, and intimate partner violence through serving as Research Director at The National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health. Her research focuses on the prevalence and impact of mental health and substance use coercion, survivor-defined research practices, and the expansion of accessible, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed services.
She has served as evaluator for program- to state-level implementation projects with goals of decreasing barriers to services for survivors who use substances or have challenges related to their mental health. As part of this work, she co-developed a validated scale of trauma-informed practice and an evaluation toolkit for gender-based violence programs to use to measure the impact of their services. State and federal policymakers have used her national needs assessments to advance expanded funding for culturally specific domestic violence services as well as behavioral health funding.
Following work as a rape crisis advocate, Heather earned a Masters of Arts in Art Therapy in 2004 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently completing a Masters of Public Health from The City University of New York's Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy.
Keynote:
Another Form of Listening: Trauma-Informed Evaluation Practices
Wednesday, May 27th, 2026
1:00 – 2:30 PM (CT)
1.5 contact hours
For programs providing services to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, meeting people where they are at, holding space, offering resources, and affirming experiences of harm while supporting healing are central practices. Despite differing goals, the same can be true for evaluation practices. During this session, attendees will learn about methods and tools to evaluate trauma-informed sexual and domestic violence services. This will include an overview of The National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health's Accessible, Culturally Responsive, and Trauma-Informed Evaluation Toolkit, which provides a suite of resources for programs to use. We will also discuss how to apply trauma-informed practices in engaging survivors, staff, community members, and other important people in the process of evaluation.
After attending the keynote presentation, the participants will be able to:
Identify best practices in engaging survivors and other stakeholders in evaluation processes.
Use and access tools designed to evaluate trauma-informed gender-based violence services.
Describe ways that survivor-defined, strength-based practices can be used in the process of evaluation
