Nicholas,
In my community of Northern Michigan we agreed solutions rested in engaging everyone in our community in a collaborative way to understand how resilience is built. It was our hope by informing schools, non-profits, community groups, and government agencies about the ACES study and how resilience is built everyone would move forward in their own circle in a trauma informed way. However, what we found is that informing was not enough to create systems change. We realized common language was needed and skills training. People needed concrete ways to translate the research into skills. This is what prompted Shenandoah Chefalo, author of Garbage Suitcase: A foster care memoir, and me to create a program to train everyone, especially non-clinicians, how to translate the research into skills to build resilience.