ACEs Connection member John Jeanetta is the president and CEO of Heartland Family Service, a social work agency based in Omaha, Nebraska. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: When did you learn about ACEs, and how did that change your work ?
A: I heard about it when I came here. Our agency had been looking at the Sanctuary Model and the discussion of becoming a more trauma-informed culture. We know the people coming to us for help have experienced trauma as children and sadly that often gets repeated as adults. By addressing that trauma...we’re stopping that intergenerational transfer and that’s like step one to getting to a higher level of self-sufficiency.
Everyone [on staff] is getting a high level of information about the ACE Study and incorporating that in their work. We had a client speak and talk about how she first came to our agency for substance abuse treatment and was sober for three years and relapsed. She had a couple of children and around the same time she'd gotten back into a relationship with one of the fathers and he tried to kill her. Now she’s been sober for a year and is in transitional housing. Her parents were abusive—it's a classic profile of ACEs. This is why we’re a multi-service organization; people come to us with lots and lots of trauma, and that’s not easy to fix -- it takes time.
Q: What does resilience to early childhood adversity mean to you?
A: To me it’s about bouncing back. We’re all going to encounter struggles and challenges, but it’s bouncing back and having hope for the future.
Q: How would you like to see trauma-informed practices shape your field?
A: First of all, I think more people need to know about the research. And then I think it would be really focusing on those universal strategies that impact as many people as possible so as a community we can really understand the research. If we can provide the right structures and supports, we can stop this from happening. We can provide supports to people we know who are struggling because of the trauma they experienced. We can bring down the cortisol and chronic stress so [clients] can learn new ways of dealing with stress, so their children don’t have to experience that same toxic stress.
Q: How do you hope to contribute to and gain from ACEs Connection?
A: Initially I was drawn to it for the research and seeing what other people are doing, how they are taking the research and putting it into practice. We’ve developed as part of our strategy a theory of change, and ACEs is factored into that. So then our intended impact is increasing people’s safety and self-sufficiency. We’ll be randomly sampling about 400 clients a year and following up to see...is the work we’re doing now helping down the road? I’m hoping we can get more data.
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