Sustainable Caring: Tools for Boundaries, Balance, and Leadership
Webinar Training Series
July 17, 2026 – Compassionate Boundaries: Caring for You While Caring for Others
July 22, 2026 – Leading Beyond Burnout: Building a Culture of Care, Boundaries, and Co-Responsibility
Both Sessions 10:00 am – 12:00 pm
The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) is pleased to announce that registration is now open for the virtual “Sustainable Caring: Tools for Boundaries, Balance, and Leadership" training series.
Participant Registration and Cost: This training is free for victim-serving professionals. Participants need to register in advance for the training. Click here to register.
Session Descriptions:
Compassionate Boundaries: Caring for You While Caring For Others
This two-hour experiential workshop invites advocates to rethink professional boundaries as an essential part of collective care. Rather than seeing boundaries as barriers that create distance, we will explore them as relational commitments that keep everyone’s dignity, safety, and humanity at the center. Advocates often give deeply of themselves, and this session acknowledges that their well-being is a vital part of the compassion they extend to survivors.
Using a trauma-informed lens, we will look at how nervous system overwhelm, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue can quietly shape interactions and reduce clarity and capacity. We will explore how thoughtful, intentional boundaries can create more spaciousness and stability for both advocates and survivors. As a group, we will reflect on questions like: How can limits be communicated in a way that is caring and attuned? What does sustainable connection look like in high-stress environments? How can boundaries support a healthier and more humane approach to advocacy?
Participants will engage in guided reflection, small group conversation, and simple grounding exercises that help illuminate how boundaries work in real time. The goal is to create a supportive environment where advocates can explore new perspectives and leave with practical ways to protect their energy while continuing to offer sincere, present, survivor-centered care.
Learning Objectives
- Participants will be able to describe the role of professional boundaries as a form of collective care that supports the well-being of both survivors and advocates.
- Participants will recognize how nervous system overwhelm, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue can affect clarity, communication, and relational presence.
- Participants will identify and practice approaches for setting and maintaining boundaries in ways that feel compassionate, sustainable, and aligned with trauma-informed advocacy.
Session 2: Leading Beyond Burnout: Building a Culture of Care, Boundaries, and Co-Responsibility
Session Description:
This two-hour training is designed for executive directors, managers, and supervisors in the victim advocacy field who are guiding teams that often carry the weight of moral injury, secondary trauma, and a persistent sense of never doing enough. Leaders in this work are frequently navigating high need, limited resources, and staff who are deeply committed but stretched thin. This session explores practical ways leadership can help shift these patterns by fostering a culture that honors care, healthy boundaries, and shared responsibility, rather than relying on quiet self-blame or unrealistic expectations that fall on individual advocates.
Through a trauma-informed lens, participants will look at how repeated exposure to trauma and systemic limitations can lead to guilt, overextension, and a gradual erosion of boundaries. We will discuss how organizational practices, communication patterns, and leadership modeling can either reinforce these challenges or create space for healing, sustainability, and clarity. Leaders will be invited to reflect on their own roles, consider the power of compassionate boundaries, and explore how to support teams in recognizing what is possible within their scope of work. The session encourages a shift away from personal burden and toward a culture of care and co-responsibility that honors both the mission and the well-being of the people carrying it out.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to identify common patterns of moral injury and boundary strain among advocates and explain how these patterns develop within trauma-exposed organizations.
- Participants will learn practical leadership strategies that promote realistic expectations, healthy communication, and shared responsibility across their teams.
- Participants will develop tools for modeling and reinforcing compassionate boundaries that support both staff well-being and long-term organizational sustainability.
Presenter:
Carolina Bautista-Velez is a Certified Professional Coach, Diversity Consultant, and mindfulness teacher with over 17 years of professional experience. She is the owner of CVelez Consulting and Metamorphosis Coaching. As a Certified Life Coach, Carolina offers a space to cultivate reflection, resilience, autonomy, and strength, where her clients can focus on learning sustainable tools to navigate desires, societal conditioning, goals, and difficulties.
Carolina has been an advocate for survivors of domestic and sexual violence for many years, providing direct services, creating programs for human trafficking survivors, and training organizations across the country on how to provide social justice and culturally informed services to survivors. She holds a degree in clinical psychology with a specialization in social psychology.
DCJS Contact Information:
Tricia Everetts
Tricia.Everetts@dcjs.virginia.gov