About 50 people drove in from north, east, west and south of Sacramento County, CA, for our first (but not our last) confab for members of ACEsConnection.com groups in Northern California.
This was one of two confabs we hosted -- the other was May 10 in Southern California. Both confabs were organized with generous support from The California Endowment.
We were very fortunate to have the UC-Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento, CA, provide a beautiful meeting space with plenty of windows and a courtyard where we ate lunch. The room had a state-of-the-art presentation system, and plenty of wall space for posters that had a snowstorm of notes stuck to them by the end of the day.
People came from Shasta, Mendocino, Siskiyou, Butte, El Dorado, Sacramento, Yolo, Sonoma, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
(l to r) Pam Stoddard, Judy Knapp, Lucy Oliveria, Lynnan Svensson, Melissa Young Cockrell
We put together a day that was heavy on interacting, while light on sitting and listening to a single speaker. We wanted people to meet each other, and work cross-sector and cross-county to share ideas, challenges, and solutions.
(l to r) Allen Nishikawa, Julie Langston, Beth Grady, Alea Tantarelli, Susan Salasin, Rhoda Blankenship, Sandra McMasters, Roshini Shah
The participants organized by sector to talk about how they were currently integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on ACEs science. They identified what was working and what wasn't.
Then they organized into their ACEsConnection groups to identify successes and challenges in starting and growing the groups.
(l to r) Rhoda Blankenship, Wendy Kinnear-Rausch, Susan Salasin, Beth Grady, Charlotte Ormond, Roshini Shah
In their last break-out sessions, they got back into their ACEsConnection groups to talk about what they needed to move forward. This included identifying what they wanted to accomplish, the action steps necessary, as well as what they needed from ACEs Connection Network, state and local government, their professional organizations and/or communities to successfully take those action steps.
Thank all of you who attended for all your hard work. We've been writing up all the transcripts of the posters you created. With what you came up with, we're putting together action plans for each group, which we'll send out later this summer, and we'll post in the groups' resources sections so that everyone can review them.
(l to r) Alea Tantarelli, Kate Jenkins, Allen Nishikawa, Sue Stephenson
We'll also be "toolkitting" the confabs so that groups can organize these same gatherings in their counties or cities.
All of you who participated…thank you so very much. It was a fast-paced, energetic and fun day, with some terrifically useful results.
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