Central Iowa's Community Awareness Effort

Every day connections are far more important than we ever believed. Caring relationships can give children a great start. They can help people with a history of trauma heal. They can improve the health of our neighbors and the well-being of families.

In Central Iowa, we have been working to bring a positive message about the childhood trauma research and the role everyone plays in addressing it to the larger community. For the most part, we have found that the ACEs research has remained largely within professional sectors, especially human services. With several groups wanting to work on community engagement in our area, we formed a committee to determine what our shared message could be and how we could not just educate the public but also engage them in behaviors that respond to this important research.

Our committee identified three main goals:

1. Develop a consistent, accessible and compelling message around ACEs, trauma-informed care and early childhood brain development that any stakeholder working on community outreach can use to represent one movement around this issue.
2. Educate community members about the importance of healthy brain development and its impact on overall community development.
3. Engage community members in building compassionate relationships to support healthy brain development at any age.

Our target audience is community members who can build the compassionate relationships with individuals and families to prevent ACEs and mitigate their effects. Example audiences include neighbors, coaches, pastors, church members, teachers, and human resource professionals.

The shared message we have developed is CONNECTIONS MATTER: Developing Brain ▪ Relationships ▪ Community (see the image attached to this blog for the designed version). We are further developing four supporting messages to help expound upon the centralpoint of the tagline:

1. Relationships are the foundation for healthy brain development.
2. Childhood trauma can disrupt healthy brain development in the absence of a caring relationship.
3. Communities can promote healthy brain development through relationship building.
4. Promoting healthy brain development is essential to community development.

These messages have been developed with some public testing and consideration of recent messaging research and will continue to be refined as we prepare for the campaign launch.

Our goal with this effort is to arm advocates not just in Central Iowa but in any community looking to raise greater awareness of trauma, early childhood development and how we can respond. We will provide facts, stories, tools and materials to help role this message out.

In addition to a website and standard awareness materials (including a logo customizable to communities), we are excited to partner with Dr. Linda Chamberlain, author of the Amazing Brain series, to create a curriculum and booklet that people can use to present to a community audience. Linda will be joining us for the official campaign launch on September 30 to train up to 300 advocates on how to deliver this presentation.

We are starting the process of meeting with community groups in the Des Moines area on how they might become a part of this effort. Our hope is to inspire new initiatives but also to help those already working on community engagement to see how this campaign can help them inspire greater action.

This is a long message, but we wanted to update everyone here on what we’re working on and offer a special thanks to many national partners for offering advice along the way. We look forward to keeping you all updated on our work as we continue. If you’d like to receive updates about Connections Matter, please fill out the form on our website (still in development) at www.connectionsmatter.org.