Rob Hall has spent three decades working with children shaped by trauma. Now, through Global Trauma Alliance, he is building an AI-powered tool designed for the moments when caregivers are overwhelmed, alone, and trying to stay human.

Near the end of a long conversation about trauma, technology, and what it means to care well for children who are hurting, Rob Hall was asked to imagine a love letter to humanity. What would he say, in this moment of AI proliferation and cultural fragmentation, to the people trying to hold things together?

He paused, and then he said this:

"For the first time in the history of our civilization, AI allows us the potential to be more human, not less if we choose to view and use it in the right ways.”

That sentence deserves to be taken seriously, because it comes from someone who has spent thirty years immersed in some of the most difficult realities of human life: the trauma that children carry into their days through no fault of their own, the brokenness that surrounds them, and the deep and painstaking work of trying to help them find a way through it. Hall is the President of Global Trauma Alliance, a division of Trauma Free World. Hall and his team are the architects of TICCO, an AI-powered tool designed not to replace the humans who care for traumatized children, but to make those more capable at the moments when their skill matters most. His argument is not simply that AI is useful, but that AI, applied in the right direction, can expand the human capacity for care to a scale that no previous intervention has achieved. Understanding why he believes this requires understanding the scale of the problem he has spent so many years trying to solve.

The Through Line

Hall will tell you this is his fourth career, though most people would call it one long calling with four chapters.

He trained as a therapist, earning a master's degree in counseling, and by circumstance became a specialist in working with children who had experienced sexual abuse and other serious forms of childhood trauma. That work shaped him in ways he did not fully understand at the time. He was drawn to the kids who sat at the edges, the ones who did not fit, the ones who had been harmed by adults who should have protected them. A righteous anger formed around children in those situations, and it has never left.

From therapy he moved into education, entering as a dean of students and eventually serving as a middle school principal for twelve years followed by two more years in the head of school's office doing research and development, fourteen years in all, still surrounded by kids, still most alive in conversations with ten-year-olds that most adults were too busy to have. When the time felt right to move again, he joined Trauma Free World where he eventually launched Global Trauma Alliance

The Missing Mechanism

The scale of what those helping kids heal from childhood trauma are working against is not easy to absorb. According to the World Health Organization, up to one billion children between the ages of two and seventeen experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect in the past year alone, not as a cumulative lifetime statistic but within a single calendar year.

Hall is careful about this number, and about the word trauma itself. There has been a cultural counter-reaction to the broadening of the term, a skepticism that risks dismissing real suffering because the vocabulary has been overextended. He has watched the polarization form: on one end, a deep and sometimes performative trauma awareness; on the other, a dismissiveness that treats the whole conversation as exaggerated. And in the middle of that argument, real children are being harmed in real ways.

"If you spend your life in it," he says, "you see that there are kids hurting, and there are adults who want help trying to help those kids heal."

What those adults encounter when they look for help reveals a specific and underappreciated truth about the field: the knowledge exists. The therapists exist. The trained social workers, the trauma-informed curricula, the evidence-based frameworks, the decades of research on how children heal, all of it exists. What has never existed is a reliable mechanism for getting any of it to the right person, in the right form, at the right moment, regardless of where they live, what time of day or night the crisis arrives, or what language they speak. The problem, in other words, is not the knowledge. It is the access. And access, at the scale of one billion children, is not a problem that more training programs or additional caseworkers can solve, because there is no version of the conventional system that reaches everywhere it needs to reach. What is required is something designed to work differently from the ground up.

Who TICCO Is For

TICCO, the AI-powered tool Hall and his team have built at Global Trauma Alliance, is their answer to that missing mechanism: not a replacement for the therapists and social workers and trauma-informed curricula that already exist, but a way of getting the right guidance to the right person at the moment they actually need it. The people it is designed to serve fall into two categories. Primary caregivers are those with a traumatized child in their home: foster parents, adoptive parents, biological parents navigating a household where trauma is present. Secondary caregivers are those who encounter affected children in other contexts: teachers, neighbors, church volunteers, youth workers who know enough about a child's background to want to respond thoughtfully but lack the training to do so confidently.

For primary caregivers in the United States, TICCO functions as an always-available extension of a support team that can  often be unavailable at the moments when it is needed. The caseworker's office is closed, the neighbor cannot help, and the crisis is happening now. TICCO's role in those moments is to act as the equivalent of a seasoned social worker who knows the specific family, the specific children, and the specific situation, and can offer guidance that is not generic but personalized.

The anonymity matters too. Some of the questions caregivers most need answered are the ones they are most reluctant to ask a real person, questions that might signal inadequacy or confusion about something they feel they should already understand. GTA’s data shows that people sometimes ask TICCO things they would never ask a human colleague, and that access to honest answers makes them measurably better equipped to care.

Internationally, where formal support structures may not exist at all, TICCO fills a different and larger gap. There is no caseworker to call and no formal support infrastructure to turn to, no system that is sometimes unavailable because it was never built in the first place. TICCO, in those contexts, often becomes the primary resource available to a caregiver trying to do something extraordinarily difficult with very little guidance.

The classroom illustrates the problem as clearly as any other context. When a child with a history of abandonment, neglect, or abuse becomes disruptive, a standard educator response is often isolation: send them to the hallway, move their seat away from the other students, deal with the problem later. That response, on the surface, is rational from a classroom management standpoint and, for the specific population of children who have experienced ruptures in primary relationships, it is exactly the wrong approach. Sending them away confirms what they already believe about how adults respond to them when they struggle. TICCO can help a teacher understand this in real time, when it matters, rather than six months later in a professional development workshop.

Who Cares for the Caregiver

In the pilot phase, Global Trauma Alliance discovered something in its own data that it had not anticipated building for.

The team had designed TICCO around the practical question of how caregivers could do their jobs better. But the backend data from pilots began surfacing a different kind of conversation entirely, one not about trauma-informed discipline strategies or bedtime routines, but about caregiver burnout, marital strain, and the feeling of being close to giving up entirely.

"People were beginning to use TICCO about their own stuff," Hall says, "not just how do I be better at this thing, but how do I actually survive this thing?"

This should not have surprised them, he says now, though it did. The research on foster care tells a stark story: between 30 and 50 percent of foster parents leave within a year, according to multiple studies, with inadequate support consistently identified as the primary driver. These are people who entered with genuine commitment and found that the reality of caring for a child carrying significant trauma, without reliable guidance and without a community that truly understands, eventually exceeds their reserves.

What the data was revealing is that the sustainability of the caregiver is not a secondary question to the wellbeing of the child. It is the precondition for it. You cannot sustainably care for another person, especially a child whose behavior may be profoundly shaped by experiences they cannot name or explain, unless someone is also caring for you. When TICCO became a space where caregivers could ask those questions about themselves, honestly and without judgment, the team realized they had built something larger than a training tool. They had built a form of companionship for people doing genuinely difficult work, often alone, often after the rest of the world has gone to sleep.

The Love Letter

One user from an early pilot summed up what TICCO offered with a line that Hall has not forgotten: "I love TICCO because a book can’t respond to me when I say I tried that and it's not working”.

The comment sounds simple, but it points at something important. Unlike a book, which delivers information but cannot respond to context, TICCO can read the specific situation, the specific child, the specific crisis arriving at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, and offer the next thing that person actually needs to hear calibrated to the moment they are actually in. That capability, Hall argues, represents something the field has never had: the ability to deliver the right knowledge, to the right person, at the exact moment when that knowledge could strengthen a human relationship rather than replace one.

This is what he means when he talks about technology making us more human, not because AI simulates connection or substitutes for the relationship between a caregiver and a child, but because it can equip the caregiver, in the moment the relationship is most fragile, to bring more skill, more calm, and more understanding to what they are trying to do together.

"Empower humans in the moment to be more kind, more loving, more healing," he says, "more whatever, more encouraged, more strengthened than ever before."

What Hall is describing runs directly against the prevailing anxiety about AI. The dominant narrative positions artificial intelligence as something that displaces the human, that makes the caregiver less necessary, the teacher less essential, the neighbor less relevant. TICCO is a working argument for precisely the opposite: that technology, designed with intention and aimed at the right problem, can make the humans inside those relationships more capable than they would be without it. The foster parent who picks up her phone at 2 a.m. and finds guidance tailored to the specific child in her specific home does not become less human in that moment. She becomes a more capable version of what she already is: someone who showed up. What the technology gives her is the skill to make that showing up matter more. That is not a peripheral point about one AI application in one corner of one field. It is a reframe of the entire conversation, an argument that the question worth asking is not what AI will take from us but what we might be able to give to each other when AI is helping us be better equipped to try.

There are still a billion children carrying real trauma into their daily lives. There is still a caregiver shortage, a system under strain, and a gap between what the problem requires and what any conventional intervention can provide. But Hall's love letter to humanity is less about the size of the problem than about what has become possible inside it.

"What I'm trying to figure out," he says, "is how we use this unbelievable breakthrough to help adult humans care more deeply for child humans."

It is a small and specific and enormous goal, and for the first time, the tools to pursue it at the scale the need demands actually exist.

Rob Hall is the President of Global Trauma Alliance and co-founder of Trauma Free World, based in Cincinnati, Ohio. This conversation is part of the Humans & AI: Founder Series by HumanCulture.

Global Trauma Alliance is a HumanCulture Member Organization. Learn more.

Sources

World Health Organization. (2026). Violence against children. WHO Fact Sheets. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/child-maltreatment

Gibbs, D., & Wildfire, J. (2007). Length of service for foster families: Using administrative data to understand retention. Child Abuse & Neglect, 31(8), 799–812. Cited in: Geiger, J. M., et al. (2023). Points of foster parent stress in the system: A qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis. Children and Youth Services Review, 149. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0190740923001615

National Foster Parent Association. (n.d.). Half of foster parents stop in their first year. Foster Care Capacity Project. https://www.fostercarecapacity.com/stories/half-of-foster-parents-stop-in-their-first-year-that-cant-continue