It was a very gratifying week, being told that our Santa Fe community forum “The Preventable Death of Anna, Age Eight,” focused on the need to design Child Welfare 2.0, was filled to capacity. It says something very good about a city when an event on childhood trauma gets booked up. To meet the interest, another workshop has been added. More will be sponsored across New Mexico to enlist people in our social moonshot and create Child Welfare 2.0.
Our challenges in New Mexico are not unlike every other city and town in the nation. We face an epidemic of childhood trauma that we have the power to end. To offer some insights on next steps, I offer an excerpt from Anna, Age Eight, Chapter Nine: Get the data and make a plan: Why we all live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO is one of those cities that makes you play by its own very pleasant set of rules. There’s no street grid, for one thing, and the roads tend to meander about like they do in London. The adobe-style buildings all look very different from what you’re used to elsewhere else in the United States. The New Mexican food is different, too – more color, more spice, and there’s probably a painting on the restaurant wall involving some deep blue and a touch of bright red you don’t see very often. Many of the stoplights are, for some reason, horizontal instead of vertical. The climate is dry and rustic feeling. It is both inviting and not at all like where you are from, yet everyone speaks English and accepts American currency, making it the ideal location to deposit some of your hard-earned travel budget. Heck, they even call it the City Different. It is what it is, and you just have to deal with it, but luckily you don’t really mind. You visit, have some unique experiences, get outside your routine while staying inside your comfort zone, and leave, clutching some gorgeous piece of art, feeling quite accomplished, and ready to recommend the place to your friends.
Those of us who live in Santa Fe are accustomed to shuttling visitors around town and observing in them this happy cycle of wonder, delight, and contentment. It’s great sublime fun, especially on one of those crisp summer evenings when the sun bounces off the Sangre de Cristo mountains just so and the air is still fresh from an afternoon rainstorm. Residents, whether they trace their roots back to before the Spanish settlers or to a Southwest Airlines flight in 2014, take an unusual loving pride in their home.
This side of Santa Fe is real, not just something we cook up for the tourists. We have great experiences like this ourselves even after you head back to the airport. Yet we also know there’s more to it than that. There is another part of town where we didn’t take you.
In the shadows of Santa Fe’s beautiful churches, under those stunning mountainous panoramas, random acts of childhood adversity take place daily, and by the thousands. Within smelling distance of the city’s great restaurants, there are low profile cases of neglect and abuse. The occasional child murders are just the tip of the spear: Awful, to be sure, but they didn’t get there by themselves. The rest of the spear is a state child poverty rate of 30 percent, the highest in the nation. About 60 percent of New Mexican kids are not in preschool. And 41 percent of our kids live in single parent families. Not coincidentally, the state is also an economic basket case, the brisk Santa Fe tourist business and small slice of Permian Basin oil to the southeast notwithstanding.
Data immunity
But this is old news. Whenever the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Survey reveals, yet again, that NM is 49th for being the most unsafe state to be a child, we roll our eyes and say, “well at least this year we aren’t 50th.” Cynical wags who have seen this movie before will add some assurance that our brilliant leaders will do their best to wrest the crown from Mississippi by this time next year.
Whether you’re John Q. Public or an unreconstructed data nerd, you’re accustomed to seeing this stuff. Our media outlets, after all, do a dutiful job of publishing the stats regularly. If we failed as an electorate to notice that, we certainly paid attention to a 2016 TV advertising campaign in which a Catholic health organization deftly satirized state tourism ad campaigns while highlighting the bad numbers. “This is New Mexico,” the friendly narrator told us as scenic vistas undulated across the screen, “where we celebrate our unique cuisine, and turn a blind eye to our hungry children.”
Another piece of old news is that our institutions do not seem to understand that with the right tools, we might be able to make a dent in some of these numbers. We once worked right next to the domestic violence unit of the state’s child welfare system, and were talking to them about how to use their treasure trove of data to a useful end. Much could be learned, we reckoned, from the domestic violence shelter clients’ use of mental health care services, recovery services, job training, and more. How long do they stay at shelters, and how often do they return? We also asked to track data to tell us about the success rate of the groups for domestic violence offenders.
Their data could be used to figure out what’s working and what’s not, allowing us to do more of one and less of the other. That translates into less violence, happier childhoods, more economic productivity, and a better quality of life for everyone, which certainly takes the edge off those stressful days at the office.
It was not to be. “That data system is only for invoicing purposes, not for data analysis,” the domestic violence unit supervisor said. We countered with, “Yes, but you are sitting on incredibly important data.” She didn’t agree. It went downhill from there.
A city of extremes
We’re tired of it, but we’re not alone. Every state has nice towns like Santa Fe that also feature a rough underbelly where you would not want to grow up. And we’re not alone when it comes to hapless governments that seem to think their mission in life isn’t to solve real problems, but to prevent the employees from buying too many paper clips. The goal appears to be a skin-deep impression of a functioning agency. Hardly anybody out there lives in a community with a comprehensive plan to address childhood trauma. No matter where your state appears on those child well-being lists, you have the same problems. We may be an extreme case here, but in many ways, you too live in Santa Fe.
Disrupting the status quo of your Santa Fe in four ways.
One: Attend (or sponsor) a community conversation on Child Welfare 2.0. The authors of Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment, Katherine Ortega Courtney, PhD and Dominic Cappello, discuss their book focused on how we must and can fix child welfare—a monumental challenge that requires the engagement of all of us. The June 28 event is FULL. A new event has been added: Thursday, July 26, 2018 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM, Santa Fe Community Foundation. Fees: FREE. For more information and to reserve a seat: https://www.santafecf.org/what...mp;cdt=7%2f26%2f2018
Two: Read our blueprint for change. www.AnnaAgeEight.org
Three: Listen to our talk on Childhood Trauma and Child Welfare 2.0. https://santafe.com/ktrc/podca...gn-child-welfare-2.0
Four: Explore our model: Learn how we are creating a city and county partnership to prevent adverse childhood experiences and trauma by strengthening family and community resilience factors: www.ResilienceLeaders.org
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