Leaders of PACEs science initiatives in four North Carolina counties are eager to begin measuring the impact of their work to solve the most intractable problems in their respective communities.
“Each of these broad-based, cross-sector task forces is about preventing childhood trauma and its negative effects on long-term health. We want to heal trauma and create and build on positive childhood experiences in our communities so individuals, families, and communities themselves can grow in health, strength, and resilience. Their work to shine a light on ways racism and inequity hurt our communities, and to improve diversity, equity, inclusion, collaboration and opportunities, is work we believe in and are behind,” said Tommy Taylor, executive director of the United Way of Cape Fear Area, who has worked closely with each of the resiliency task forces.
Task forces are in four counties: New Hanover, Brunswick, Pender and Columbus.
Soon, leaders of each resiliency effort will send a 14-question Milestones Survey, part of the PACES Connection Community Resilience Tracker, to organizations in each county that are participating in their respective resilience initiatives. The results of the survey will tell them how far these organizations have come on their path to becoming trauma-informed and healing-centered.
They are able to undertake this measurement because the United Way of Cape Fear Area is underwriting their access to the sophisticated data tools offered to members of the PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities. As part of the Coop, they will join other affiliates not only in tracking their progress, but also in network leadership training; learning collaboratives on subjects such as trauma-informed education; and in-depth training in how diversity, equity and inclusion intertwine with the science of positive and adverse childhood experiences. They will also be able to collaborate with fellow members of the Coop to share what works and what doesn’t to develop a community that integrates practices and policies based on PACEs science.
According to Jane Stevens, founder and publisher of PACEs Connection, who was with the Cape Fear Area community managers and members of their communities last week for the announcement of their joining the Coop, the first part of the data gathering process is also prescriptive.
“Milestones survey questions are prescriptive, in that going through them gives organization leaders a path to achieve goals that will actually help the organization and its employees improve relationships, safely explore causes of employee turnover and likely improve employee and customer, client, or patient satisfaction,” she said.
“The second part of the data work is the sector surveys. Using publicly available data, including some from the Cape Fear Collective, we will be able to show part of the impact of having trauma-informed policies and practices in schools, healthcare, law enforcement and other sectors,” Stevens said.
Joining the PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities is another step along the long and sustained path that the counties are taking to educate all citizens about the science of PACEs.
“We are particularly interested in seeing the impact of having more than 4,000 people in New Hanover County trained in either theCommunity Resiliency Model(CRM) or theResources for4 Resiliency(R4R) model,” said Mebane Boyd, the former director of theNew Hanover Resiliency Task Force, who now serves as Resilient Communities Officer at theNorth Carolina Partnership for Childrenworking with coalitions throughout the state.
“In New Hanover County, community members have taken these trainings to help them function better in times of stress, whether it’s daily stressors at home, secondary trauma from working with traumatized children or adults, or natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, or even the pandemic," said Boyd.
A primary focus of the New Hanover County Resiliency Task Force’s work for almost three years, the CRM and R4R trainings offer an overview of the science of adverse childhood experiences, an understanding of the biology of stress and how the body and brain function—or don’t function—during traumatic stress.
“Most importantly,” said J’vanete Skiba, acting director of the New Hanover County Resiliency Task Force, herself a CRM trainer, “the trainings show people how to move their brains and bodies from the state of flight, fight, freeze, where they can add to the trauma of themselves and others, to a regulated state, where they can access their reasoning brain to think, plan, and de-escalate trauma.”
“I’m thankful for the time our community took to create an action plan that could be applied to our many systems,” said Boyd. “The CRM and R4R trainings were a critical part of ‘taking care of the providers’ goal first before we began educating the general public about ways to manage stress. We realized very early on that those who were providing services in our communities were being traumatized at work themselves, and that unless those providing services were well, we couldn’t provide helpful, trauma-informed services to the thousands in our community. That’s why we put so much emphasis on these trainings first.”
Community managers Lauren Clark in Brunswick County; Amy Read in Pender County, who are also certified to teach CRM, and Selena Rowell and Jai Robinson in Columbus County, have also been leading efforts in their respective counties to make these trainings available.
Further, just as in New Hanover County, they have used documentaries such as "Resilience” or “Paper Tigers” to help community members learn about trauma, its impact, and how working together to prevent and heal trauma leads to healthier individuals and communities.
Last week’s announcement of the UW-CFA funding for the four counties to join the Cooperative of Communities was made after months of work by the community managers of each group to build their memberships and vet the tools and benefits of the Coop. They worked with members and member organizations to discern priorities, create plans, and gather membership agreements pledging involvement in the work to advance trauma-informed policies, as these documents must be signed for an organization to participate in the Milestones Survey.
Accelerating change
“The data tools will reveal extremely valuable information that can show progress and accelerate change,” said Stevens. “This information can ultimately be used to help calculate how much money a community is saving by integrating practices based on PACEs science.”
Task force leaders say the ultimate goal is to have the trauma-informed, healing-centered practices integrated deeper into each sector and organization in the communities. With the Coop survey tools to track and document what is working and how well, the efforts are more likely to be sustainable over time, showing an ongoing return on investments.
PACEs Connection is a nonprofit organization founded in 2012 to advance the science of positive and adverse childhood experiences (PACEs) and unite the people, organizations, systems and communities in the worldwide PACEs movement in solving our most intractable problems. The PACEs Connection social network serves as the movement’s main information exchange and resource, providing support for hundreds of local, state and national PACEs initiatives. It recently surpassed 52,000 members worldwide, and offers a free community site and assistance to some 400 geographic and more than 40 interest-based communities.
This is the second of a series of articles about the four resiliency initiatives from the Cape Fear Area of North Carolina joining the Cooperative of Communities, and the involvement of the United Way of the Cape Fear Area in each of the county’s efforts.
For more information about the PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities, please contact the Community Facilitator for your geographic region of the country.
Comments (0)