April 2022

The Power of Partnerships In the forward to the NJ ACES Statewide Action Plan , the Executive Director of NJ Office of Resilience, Dave Ellis, provides essential insight into New Jersey’s vision of collaboration and partnerships in building a trauma-informed and healing-centered state. Nowhere in the plan are identified silos of service. Families, schools, businesses, early care programs, community health care programs and more are now identified as the community where comprehensive services...

Child maltreatment continues to be a devastating and pervasive problem in the United States. Most children are referred to protective services for neglect. Methods of possible intervention and treatment from a community and family systems approach to maltreatment, rather than societal castigation, is of the utmost importance. Neglect is often an unintended consequence of poverty, limited resources and lack of family support. One could go further and find that adverse environments are...

New data presented by the CDC on Adverse Childhood Experiences ( https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html ) as well as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) ( https://www.samhsa.gov/child-trauma/understanding-child-trauma ) converge in acknowledgement of the urgency in developing a sustainable coordinated system care to support identified high-risk families with complex health and behavioral health care needs. Utilizing integrated data from multiple...