This map of the San Francisco Bay Area shows the violent, very strong and strong shaking that will occur in a major earthquake that will happen sometime in the next 30 years.
Before some smart geologists figured out plate tectonics and seismologists integrated that knowledge, we couldn’t predict this.
But, to coin a phrase that you may have heard before: What is predictable is preventable, in this case, injury and death from earthquakes. So, in California, this knowledge changed everything: engineering, building codes, emergency response, public water systems, urban planning, etc.
Californians expect the application of this knowledge. And if, as after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, people die when a freeway and parts of a bridge collapse, there’s sadness and outrage, followed by demands to build safe structures that will be resilient during a good shake.
They only notice the absence of these cross-sector, integrated protections when the prevention systems that are put in place don’t work. Californians are also, in a way, proud of these systems, especially when they hear about the thousands or tens of thousands of people who die in earthquakes in parts of the world where communities haven’t changed their systems to put preventions into place.
Just as plate tectonics revolutionized geology, our new understanding of human development and behavior — ACEs science — is revolutionizing our understanding of human behavior. [ACEs science = the original CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study and subsequent expanded surveys that include community and systems adversity, how toxic stress from ACEs harms kids’ and adults brains, how toxic stress harms short- and long-term health, how we pass ACEs from one generation to the next, and the fabulous fifth part: resilience research that shows we, our families, our organizations, our systems and our communities can heal from toxic stress by implementing trauma-informed and resilience-building practices.]
Since learning all this, I feel like a journalist in California might have felt in the early 1900s when learning about plate tectonics: I would have been compelled to tell everyone to rally around changing our systems of materials engineering, structural engineering, building design, urban planning, public safety, emergency response, etc. so that when the next big one hit, it wouldn’t kill or hurt so many people.
And since I learned about ACEs science in 2004, I felt — and continue to feel — compelled to tell everyone to learn about this new knowledge and pass it on, so that people are empowered to change all of our organizations, systems and communities to stop traumatizing already traumatized people.
But we have a leg up on geologists and seismologists. Because, unlike earthquakes, we don’t have to settle for preparing for ACEs; we can prevent ACEs.
When I launched ACEs Connection Network in 2012, I hoped that ACEs Connection would marry the power of trauma-informed, resilience-building, solution-oriented journalism and the power of social media. I knew what the companion news site, ACEsTooHigh.com, would be….a news site for the general public. However, since ACEs Connection is a social network, it’s a community of passionate, pioneering souls like you.
My role in this community is a little like a traditional small-town newspaper publisher: I want this community to thrive — this community, which numbers close to 18,500 people and more than 100 communities. The ACEs Connection Network team and I do our best to create a safe place and a trusted source where you can share your information with each other and develop the trusted relationships necessary to work together and distribute this new, society-changing, culture-changing knowledge as rapidly as possible.
My role is also as a watchdog for the community, to draw attention to emerging issues that we need to address.
There are two that face us now:
One is training for organizations to integrate trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on ACEs science. Anyone who promises that an organization will be trauma-informed after a three-hour workshop is selling snake oil. So, we’re developing a consumer guide for organizations so that they know what questions to ask before hiring trainers.
We’re also organizing a group of people to figure out what criteria trainers should have, and what a basic curriculum should include. That’s because if it focuses only on trauma-informed practices and doesn’t include all of ACEs science, organizations aren’t going to be as successful as those that are educated about and integrate ACEs science. By the way, if you want to participate, send Gail Kennedy a note (gkennedy@acesconnection.com).
The other issue is saying that ACEs are only the problem of inner city poor people of color. This belief continues the great divides our society has created in health, education, and wealth. It continues the them-us approach, which is not what ACEs science tells us is the way to go. It says that “they” are the problem and need to change, instead of acknowledging that it is our systems, our society and our culture that need to change, that need to heal from the toxic stress of ACEs so that we stop passing them along.
The original CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study of 17,000 mostly white, middle- and upper-middle class residents of San Diego (all of whom had jobs and great health care because they were all Kaiser members) shows that middle and upper-middle class white people who have high ACE scores also suffer. And they can also do a lot of damage — consider the shooters in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, TX, and Newtown, CT.
Rich, powerful people who have high ACE scores can do a lot of damage to themselves, too. And their potential to do harm to others is much greater than any poor person in the inner city. One rich, powerful person with a high ACE score who comes to mind is Donald Trump. You can probably name a few others, including leaders of countries and organizations.
This is all to say that any organization serving a community that hasn’t determined its own burden of ACEs as well as its strengths of resilience is still telling the people it serves: “You’re the problem and need to change. We aren’t.”
Although the watchdog role is an important part of what I do, one of our main goals is to provide you with solution-oriented journalism that can inform and inspire change. We do our best to do so in a trauma-informed way.
Some examples are articles about:
Education:
Many schools – including schools in San Francisco, CA, Spokane, WA, San Diego, CA, and Walla Walla, WA — have integrated trauma-informed practices into classrooms, playgrounds and school policies. Many schools have seen 90 percent drops in suspensions after one year; after three years, some schools no longer expel students and some no longer even have the need for in-school suspensions, and the kids’ grades, test scores and graduation rates go up.
Justice:
Courts have integrated trauma-informed approaches. Safe Babies Courts have integrated ACEs science in resilience-building practices that provide wrap-around services for families; a year after participating in Safe Babies Courts, 99 percent of the children suffer no further abuse.
Health:
Pediatricians (here’s an update on the Children’s Clinic), including Kaiser Permanente pediatricians in Northern California are screening patients for ACEs. A rural health clinic in Pueblo, CO, changed its medical practice after it integrated ACEs screening. A family physician in Tennessee educates his opioid patients about their ACEs, and it helps motivate them to heal themselves. This article hit a nerve; between ACEsTooHigh.com and ACEsConnection.com, it has received more than 1.2 million page views.
Communities:
Cities and states are integrating ACE-, trauma-informed practices and resilience-building practices. This report on self-healing communities describes how integrating ACEs science drastically reduced youth suicide, teen pregnancy, juvenile arrests, and high-school drop-out rates — all at the same time — in communities in Washington State that integrated practices based on ACEs science.
ACEs Connection is also a place for you to post your articles and essays…the more we share what we learn, the faster we’ll solve our most intractable problems, and move our organizations and systems from managing problems to managing solutions. When that happens, we will be living in communities that look and feel very different than the ones we live in now.
In the six years since ACEs Connection Network was launched, the ACEs movement has seen remarkable progress. Between 1,000 and 2,000 pediatricians are integrating or starting to integrate ACEs science — 30,000 more to go. Hundreds of schools are trauma-informed; about 130,000 to go in the U.S.. In the U.S., there are hundreds of communities that have ACEs initiatives. All that remains are about 29,000+ cities and towns and nearly 4,000 counties. But if we continue to accelerate as we have been, we’re going to move a lot faster than the 50 years it took the geology community to integrate practices based on the new knowledge of plate tectonics.
Another of our main goals is to work with communities’ ACEs initiatives — cross-sector community-based networks — to provide you with guidelines and tools you need to be successful. After a year and a half of development and testing, we recently launched Growing Resilient Communities 2.0, which includes a community tracker to measure your progress. You can now map your presentations across sectors and track organizations’ progress in their transition to becoming trauma-informed. Two communities — Sonoma and Yolo counties — have launched their community trackers, and we about another dozen in the works.
But like you, we’re still figuring this out. It is only with your participation, advice, courage and stories that we are able to multiply all that to share the best knowledge and practices with each other and communities that are just starting this work.
What we do know, without a doubt, is that this knowledge gives people inspiration. We do know, without a doubt, that this is truly, as Laura Porter and Rob Anda have said, a science of hope. Personal hope. Organizational hope. Community hope. Hope for us in a time when hope often seems hard to come by.
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