ACEs: From Grassroots to Hollywood

Dr. Vincent Felitti, MD again joined our SoCal (Southern California) ACEs Group  March 7 for our  alternate-month San Diego meeting. He’s shown with author-activist Morgan Rose (details below).  I felt so grateful.

Earlier March 7 we began with the alternate-month meeting of the San Diego Trauma-Informed Guide Team (SD-TIGT),  on what we can do to create a trauma-informed and ACEs-informed society. The mission of  SD-TIGT is to promote the development and provision of trauma-informed services in San Diego County’s agencies and systems by collaboration, advocacy and education to achieve transformation.  Leaders discussed training community leaders  and a trauma-informed care workforce.

Several focused on making trauma recovery “consumer-driven.”  They reported success with it after forming committees of parents, youth, and other clients  to do peer-led trauma-prevention training and learn empathic methods help each other and help children to recover.  We also discussed the latest brain science on Developmental Trauma by MDs Bessel van der Kolk, Bruce Perry, and Daniel Siegel.  Perhaps San Diego County might create a Trauma Remediation Center modeled on Dr. van der Kolk’s Trauma Center in Boston and Dr. Perry’s ChildTrauma Academy in Houston?

SoCal ACEs meeting

Next, SoCal ACEs met separately.  Dr. Felitti related his efforts since the 1990s to promulgate the ACE Study results in the U.S. and worldwide medical literature, traveling to Washington to meet personally with Senators, traveling the world and beating the drum generally with policy leaders.  He repeated his hope to see an article in The New Yorker about the ACE Study, “because my wife says that if policy leaders are too busy to get it, this way maybe their wives will pick up on it and get active...

READ MORE... on Dr. Felitti's vision, Morgan Rose's "Americas Angel," and Dana Brown's work deep in the community. See the ACE Study in action, on the ground, with all the science and the heart, in Dana's report on San Diego’s Trauma-Informed Community Schools (TICS) at Cherokee Point Elementary.

If you haven't seen it (I'm new to all this) also see Jane Stevens' incredibly moving July 2013 report "At Cherokee Point Elementary, kids don’t conform to school; school conforms to kids" (under "READ MORE"...)