Following Monday's Philadelphia ACES Task Force meeting, I have been giving further thought to what may be meant by "prevention" in the area of trauma reduction and building resilience for Philadelphia families. We know what the problems are, as summarized by the statement on the Multiplying Connections website: "As many are now aware, the ACE Study demonstrates that toxic stress and traumatic childhood experiences can lead to significant social, emotional and cognitive impairments, as well as chronic diseases and unhealthy behaviors across the life span."
Further, the more recent Urban ACE Study conducted in Philadelphia, results of which were published last year demonstrated that factors such as poverty, racism and community violence led to even higher ACE scores for many when compared to the original California study. This probably came as no surprise to many of us, as these can all be considered sources of toxic stress.
The public health field has now shown convincingly that there is strong correlation, for example, between poverty and poorer health outcomes.
We obviously know that prevention is better than cure, for all sorts of reasons. So back to my question: When it comes to trauma and adverse childhood experiences, what, exactly, are we aiming to prevent?
Clearly the answer can be multifaceted: We would like to prevent all forms of domestic and community violence; we would like to prevent health disparities; we would like to prevent the huge disparities that exist in basic educational opportunities and - often related to the all three - we would love to eradicate poverty. Clearly, there are no easy answers on how to address these overwhelming problems.
On a positive note, however, I was very pleased to learn of one effort in Philadelphia that is trying to address these issues, and would like to suggest that you take a moment to look at the work being done by the Mayor’s Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity (CEO) with their “Shared Prosperity Philadelphia” project.
The stated mission of the CEO is to: “Align the city’s efforts to lift individuals and communities out of poverty and increase opportunities for low income individuals and families. The causes and effects of complex social problems like poverty are interdependent. They arise from the interactions of human and social factors and government, corporate and social sector organizations. CEO was created to be a catalyst and serve as the supportive infrastructure to the city’s cross-sector efforts to fight poverty.”
Shared Prosperity Philadelphia has specific goals, all of which have relevance to the ACES work, and one of which resonates in particular: to “Ensure that children enter school prepared to learn and expand opportunities for year round learning.”
It is encouraging to know that there is a specific office in city government that is dedicated to addressing some of the underlying issues that we already know can lead to adverse childhood experiences, and it would seem to make sense to explore whether the Philadelphia ACES community can collaborate in some way with Shared Prosperity Philadelphia to address our mutual missions.
Comments (1)