Right now our children, families and communities face stark challenges. Pandemics and economic disruptions make once comfortable lives vulnerable, while those already enduring adversity find life impossible. 100% Community, a new book guiding a groundbreaking initiative, is the reset button, providing the roadmap for how we work together in new ways to create local systems of health, safety, education and economic stability.
What does COVID-19 have to do with ACEs? The way to prevent the harsh consequences of pandemics and traumatic childhoods is to ensure that every family has access the ten vital services for surviving and thriving including medical care, behavioral health care, food security programs, housing security programs, transportation to vital services and fully-resourced community schools with trauma-information behavioral health care and medical clinics to serve both students and families.
To be clear, what’s hurting our most vulnerable children now is the economic disruption that means community supports have become weaker. Parents lose their jobs. Families watch the news hearing of threats of infection. Stress, fear and frustration mount. The future is frightening at best and traumatizing at worst. For those of us committed to preventing and treating ACEs, we need to ensure vital services in all our communities now. For those of us who care about our most vulnerable families wondering how they can pay the bills, we must create in each county a seamless system of care.
In our first book Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment, my co-author Katherine Ortega Courtney, PhD and I presented a call to action. In our new book 100% Community: Ensuring 10 Vital Services for Surviving and Thriving, we provide a comprehensive guide for ensuring that all states, cities and communities become crisis-proof.
100% Community demonstrates how leaders can, and are right now, ensuring that ten vital services shown to strengthen childhoods in their communities are fully working and accessible. We call these services that no one can do without, the “surviving and thriving services.” These begin with accessible medical care to address COVID-19 and all health challenges. Mental health care, parent supports, early childhood learning programs, youth mentors and job training are also services so many of our families need today. Each of these services play a vital role in keeping our communities safe from challenges — both predictable and unexpected.
For those thinking that these services already exist in their county, city or state, 100% Community will demonstrate how far that is from reality. Readers will discover that even if some of these services do exist, when a crisis strikes, access to these services often disappear in the blink of an eye. According to the authors: “If we have learned anything from decades of crisis after crisis, it is that we are all more vulnerable than we think.” 100% Community has the plan for the safety and success of everyone.
Alan Webber, Mayor of Santa Fe, NM, says about 100% Community, “In this time of crisis and change, we all need a guidebook toward a better future. As we come out from the current emergency, 100% Community gives us the map to social justice and equity, a template for a way forward that can turn a crisis into an opportunity for all of our children and families.”
100% Community provides a tested step-by-step guide to creating a seamless local system of health, safety and training. Insights from decades of real-world experience facing crisis provide context and expertise to ensure vital local systems that leave no child or family behind. This means we finally build the services to end ACEs and become crisis-proof and truly caring communities.
To learn more about the book and 100% Community initiative visit: www.tenvitalservices.org
Comments (0)