In his blog, Nick mentions the Mayor’s Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity (CEO) and some of its goals towards ameliorating poverty in the City. I certainly agree that addressing poverty is not only an important step towards reducing ACEs, but also badly needed in order to improve health outcomes and eliminate health disparities.
I am very encouraged to see that two of the goals for CEO are to focus workforce development and job creation efforts on adults with the greatest barriers to employment, and also to expand access to public benefits and essential services. While the efforts of CEO towards achieving these goals certainly will not eliminate poverty in Philadelphia, they represent small steps in the right direction. Ultimately, all major change for good starts with small steps like these and gradually builds momentum.
As the original ACEs study shows, poverty is not a prerequisite for the existences of ACEs, but the Philadelphia ACEs Study demonstrates that it is an exacerbating factor.