A panel on integrating ACEs into communities at the city, county, and state level was held on October 16 at the 2018 National ACEs Conference in San Francisco. It was followed by a Q&A with the three presenters on the panel and chaired by Gail Kennedy, the community lead for ACEs Connection.
Andi Clements, professor and assistant chair of the Psychology Department at East Tennessee State University, described a project to create toolkits for communities to implement ACEs. She partnered with an unlikely ally: Becky Haas, community crime prevention coordinator at the Johnson City Police Department, who is concerned with the opioid crisis in that state. In 2014, she and Becky started a four-hour training program based on a SAMHSA paper providing guidelines for integrating ACEs science into communities.
Since then, she and her team have developed six-hour train-the-trainer courses and a self-care program for trainers. They've also partnered with 40 organizations throughout the state. As a result, they’ve managed to almost completely eliminate student dropouts at Topper Academy, a local high school, as well as help Niswanger Children’s Hospital become a trauma-informed institution.
Her takeaways are that you don’t need prior knowledge to do training: you just need to teach simply and straightforwardly to reach a wide audience. And it’s important to use stories and videos to help people feel what you are trying to teach.
Dr. Bill Dietz is the chair and director of the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at The George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. A doctor specializing in obesity, he helped establish Building Community Resilience (BCR), a national collaborative and network to improve the health of communities by engaging them to become trauma informed and offer solutions for resilience.
Dietz, like the other panelists, believes that we must change our systems, particularly those reinforcing poverty, racism, and violence, to deal with the 25 percent of our population that has three or more ACEs.
“Clinical interventions are not enough, “ he said. “We need to build community resilience.”
He points out that although ACEs affect all races, genders, and income levels equally, the ability to develop resilience is affected by whether one completes high school. Outcomes, he explained, are much worse if one does not complete high school.
BCR has initiatives in cities across the United States, including Washington, DC, Dallas, St. Louis/Kansas City, and Cincinnati, as well as the state of Oregon. In each locale, BCR teams help communities develop broad partnerships and learn how to engage families.
Critical to implementing these initiatives is the ability of each community to identify an integrator, develop trust with partners, collaborate, share common goals, develop metrics, and create sustainability through funding. The ultimate goal is to build equitable community environments so as to eliminate disparities created by income, education, and race.
Karen Johnson is the director of Trauma-Informed Services with the National Council for Behavioral Health, a membership organization that coordinates access to high-quality integrated health care. This organization works with 650 organizations in learning communities throughout the nation to engage communities through ACEs awareness and implementation.
Johnson described three ACEs community initiatives her organization helped implement: one in Trenton, NJ; one in Carter County, Okla; and the third was for the entire state of Wisconsin. Although each took a slightly different approach, general takeaways included these guidelines:
- Raise awareness first using ACEs science.
- Leverage relationships and get peers to talk to each other.
- Form collaborative partnerships and engage the community.
- Find a common focus and create a vision statement.
- Engage local, regional, and state leadership.
“We need to learn to speak across parties,” she said, reiterating a common theme speakers made throughout this conference: ACEs is a bipartisan issue. It affects everyone in all parties, and if we keep focusing on creating awareness and sharing tools for developing resilience, the movement will continue to grow.
Panel chair Gail Kennedy reiterated what Jane Stevens, ACEs Connection founder and publisher, had said earlier in the conference keynote, that ACEs Connection will soon provide tools for a national cooperative model that will be integrated into the current ACEs Connection social network. It looks as if the community movement is underway at all levels, whether city, county, or state.
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