Baby courts: A proven approach to stop the multigenerational transmission of ACES (adverse childhood experiences) in child welfare (Aug.7)
“Baby court is a proven approach to healing the trauma of both child and parent and breaking the cycle of maltreatment,” said Mimi Graham, Ed.D., director of the Florida State University Center for Prevention and Early Intervention Policy.
Graham and her colleague Lynn Tepper, retired Early Childhood Court judge from Florida’s Sixth Judicial Circuit, shared an overview of infant-toddler courts, facts about the success of the courts in Florida, and an update on efforts to expand the courts nationwide.
This timely conversation happened in the week that the U.S. House of Representatives began to learn more about Infant-Toddler Courts in the proposed new Strengthening America’s Families Act (SAFA). SAFA would help allocate seed money to fund baby courts nationwide.
During the webinar, Graham and Tepper also discussed:
- The growth of the Early Childhood Courts movement in Florida
- The brain science behind the baby courts
- The importance of creating and maintaining parent-child attachment
- The importance of parent-child psychotherapy
- The importance of home visits and help with getting them billed to social services
- Outcomes for children who go through baby courts as compared to regular courts
- Cost savings of baby courts
- What we can do in our own ACEs communities to help bring baby courts to our towns, cities, counties, states.
Resources:
Early Childhood Court -- A manual for how Florida created baby courts.
Trauma-informed policing: How three highly experienced community leaders strengthen ties between police and community (July 31)
ACEs initiative participants in areas where there is tension between the community and law enforcement were among those joining a compelling conversation on law enforcement, ACEs science, COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement and protests. The session featured Becky Haas, a nationally recognized ACEs science initiative builder and trainer; Renée Wilson-Simmons, the head of the ACE Awareness Foundation of Memphis, Tennessee; and Maggi Duncan, executive director of the Tennessee Association of Chiefs of Police.
Wilson-Simmons and Haas discussed the ACE Awareness Foundation in Memphis and provided an in-depth look at the foundation's signature program, Universal Parenting Places (UPP), where parents can receive professional counseling, information, and emotional support for family-related issues or concerns, no matter how small.
Webinar participants were invited to ask Wilson-Simmons questions about the origin of UPPs and her advice on how such a program might be replicated.
Haas and Duncan shared how their mutual passion to reduce childhood trauma led to their work on behalf of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to launch, statewide, the Handle with Care (HWC) law. This law is an innovative partnership between law enforcement and education that helps inform school personnel when a child has been caught up in an incident involving police, such as a domestic violence call during the middle of the night. Once school officials are alerted by email or fax, the child can be handled with care the next day, and not asked to take tests or engage in other stressful activities that might lead to further traumatizing an already traumatized person.
Haas and Duncan discussed groundbreaking programs Haas helped create, including Building Strong Brains Tennessee and the Building a Trauma Informed System of Care toolkit.
They also discussed how HWC is a good starting point for community sectors such as education, police, and child services to begin working together to the benefit of all.
Also covered in the webinar were:
- Examples of trauma-informed policing and officer self-care
- Some solutions for what has been happening in policing for the last couple of months, since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis
- The challenges of taking trauma-informed policies into a police department
- The benefits of what an informed partnership with law enforcement could mean for officers and communities
Resources:
Building a Trauma Informed System of Care website and download
Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Toolkit.pdf
Two ACEs Champions share: The urgency of ACEs initiatives helping systems of care, and the communities they’re in, become trauma-informed (July 24)
ACEs champions Danette Glass of Alpharetta, Georgia, and Becky Haas, of Johnson City, Tennessee, discussed the need for systems of care to do more to help prevent and heal adverse childhood experiences and help individuals and communities increase resilience.
Friends and expert community organizers, the women shared their passions for and approaches to this work. Haas works from inside community entities such as law enforcement or health care systems, and Glass works from the outside in, as a community organizer and youth leader determined to improve existing systems of care or create her own to effect change.
Haas, the author of a toolkit shared in ACEs Connection Growing Resilient Communities (Building a Trauma-Informed System of Care), learned about ACEs in 2014, while working with police to reduce drug-related and violent crime.
Glass learned about the ACEs Study in 2017, while working on a project for adjudicated youth that was funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). She realized the level of trauma exposure for young people was at an all-time high. The heightened levels of family and community trauma concerned her tremendously.
Glass and Haas shared common concerns about the increasing need for mental health services during and after the COVID-19 crisis, and the need to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community.
They also discussed the importance of helping communities build resilience, and the urgency of involving more people to accelerate the work of preventing and ACEs, and building resilience.
Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Toolkit.pdf
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