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What do you do, and what does your organization do?
Marina works for Northwest Educational Service District 189, which serves five counties by providing teacher support, alternative schooling for youth, and prevention and intervention services. She is a transition reentry coach based at the juvenile court, where she works with kids transitioning from detention centers back into the community.
What personal or professional moment or event in your life inspired you to work on ACEs?
When Marina was in middle school she was labeled as an at-risk youth. However, she began to notice that some of youth who dropped out of school were struggling much more than she was. She attributes her resilience to the extra support she received at home. Other kids’ parents were not able to assure their children that they had support. Marina was able to provide support to her friends, and from these experiences she decided early on that she wanted to work in an inner city school. Since then, her path has led her to work with youth in a number of different ways (although not at an inner city school). These experiences have shown her that adults often really don’t know how to help the youth they were working with.
What does resilience to early childhood adversity mean to you?
To Marina, resilience means that a youth has retained motivation to keep moving forward.
How have you used ACEs in your work or life? Has it changed what you do?
Marina is now more direct with her clients about the difficulties that their ACEs will create throughout their lives. She tells them that they will need to work harder to set their baggage aside, but that they must acknowledge that the baggage will always be there. She tells them that things will be harder for them, but they will not always know in advance when it will be harder. Because of all of this, they must be willing to speak up, seek support, work extra hard to take care of themselves.
How do you hope to contribute to and what do you hope to gain from ACEsConnection?
Marina wants to strengthen her field to help youths with ACEs. She has seen many attempts to help children transitioning from detention back to the community, but none have worked well enough that the organizations have continued to use them long-term. She hopes ACEs will help the field to better understand what it does and does not know about how to best help kids transition. She hopes to use the site as a resource to do this.
You can find out more about Marina or get in touch with her from her ACEsConnection profile:
http://acesconnection.com/profile/MarinaBall
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