As our Anna, Age Eight Institute reaches its sixth month of operation in New Mexico, I wanted to share a bit about our work to end ACEs, trauma and social adversity. Through relationship-building, community mobilization and communication, we have been able to do four things:
ENGAGE: Convince leaders and the public that we are living within an epidemic of adverse childhood experiences, leading to family and community trauma.
INNOVATE: Explain to all stakeholders that changes to systems of community support are needed, because trauma comes with huge costs, such as overwhelming the capabilities of public sector services or harming students’ educational performance, which makes them unprepared to enter the workforce and leads to underperforming local economies.
EMPOWER: Inform and activate the public with the knowledge that ACEs and trauma are predictable and preventable. Through research focused on the social determinants of health, innovations in every family and student-serving sector, and advances in technology, we can eradicate the root causes of trauma and health disparities with the same determination we used to eradicate smallpox and polio.
TEST: We have developed three pilot sites in three counties to showcase our 100% Community initiative, a data-driven and cross-sector ACEs prevention strategy.
How our history informs our present
When we launched our Anna, Age Eight Institute, we created a two-minute video to provide an overview of why we exist and what we would accomplish. We provide the script here to share our mission.
100% Community
For those of us working in the state capital of Santa Fe, New Mexico, we are aware of our most struggling county, Rio Arriba, just a thirty-minute drive north. Like most parts of the United States, it is not uncommon to have wealthy communities (such as Santa Fe or Los Alamos), bordering communities that have, for many decades, struggled with poverty, drug misuse and trauma.
Rio Arriba has been called the heroin capital of the world. A ground zero for the opioid epidemic. It’s a community working tirelessly to heal but facing stark challenges.
These challenges also impact the entire state and nation. It is far more complicated than just drugs. People misuse substances to numb emotional pain–often due to traumatic experiences in childhood.
To end an epidemic of drug abuse requires we end an epidemic of childhood trauma.
For twenty years, since the publication of the original Adverse Childhood Experience Study, there’s been no cross-sector, data-driven and county-focused plan (that’s part of a comprehensive statewide initiative guided by the social determinants of health) to end ACEs and childhood trauma… until now, with the creation of the Anna, Age Eight Institute and its 100% Community initiative.
We’re the first data-driven organization in the nation dedicated to addressing the collision of two interrelated challenges: childhood trauma and social adversity.
- We face historical trauma and adverse childhood experiences, leading to a multitude of challenges.
- We live in a society that tells our most vulnerable populations to fix themselves without mental health care, medical care, housing, food, transport, education and jobs.
Our families are trapped in a cycle of addiction, trauma and poverty, generation after generation. What we face is not an out of control and unpredictable force of nature: it’s a man-made preventable problem, remedied with human ingenuity, compassion and courage.
Innovation guides our new 100% Community initiative. Our mission: every child, safe and successful. Across New Mexico’s thirty-three counties, we’re building systems of care, safety and learning.
We’re collaborating with mayors, council members, county commissioners, school board members, university leaders and all community stakeholders using the 4-step process of continuous quality improvement: assessing, planning, acting and evaluating.
In the spirit of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: “We’re moving our families from surviving to thriving.” We’re working to ensure that 10 vital family-focused services are accessible so that 100% of New Mexicans thrive. County by county, we are working to ensure that all our children are trauma-free and thriving.
Join us as we work to end trauma and commit to the success of 100% of our children, students and families.
To learn more visit us at www.AnnaAgeEight.org. We hope to share our progress and learn from yours.
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