I have some great news!
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded the ACEs Connection Network a two-year $384,000 grant!
As part of its commitment to improving the health of the nation’s most vulnerable people and to building a culture of health, the nation’s largest health-focused philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, recently announced a $384,000, two-year grant to the ACEs Connection Network. The network comprises ACEsConnection.com, a community of practice social network, and its accompanying news site, ACEsTooHigh.com.
The grant will help grow ACEsConnection.com, which links people – online and face-to-face -- who are implementing trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on adverse childhood experiences research.
In the two years since I launched the site, ACEsConnection.com has grown to nearly 2,000 participants who connect, inform, and inspire each other every day through posts as well as news, events, and resources as part of what has become a growing social movement.
Thanks to this generous grant, we can grow our organization and add community managers/journalists, a graphic artist, an information specialist and an intern. Our goal is to increase ACEsConnection.com to 8,000 participants and more than 100 community groups. We’ll also be able to update and upgrade our Mapping the Movement map, so that you can easily identify the people and communities actively working in this movement.
Our companion news site, ACEsTooHigh, which features articles and stories for the general public, will benefit from this grant as well. Hundreds of thousands of people have already read the articles on this site and forwarded them to their school boards, physicians, and community leaders. The stories are also distributed to other media sites, including The Huffington Post and SocialJusticeSolutions.com. With our additional resources, we will be able to write more stories about how people and communities are implementing practices based on ACEs research and concepts, and distribute these stories more widely.
I’m happy to announce the first four members of our team:
- Elizabeth Prewitt, one of the community managers of ACEsConnection.com and who will also continue with her insightful policy analysis. Formerly, she was director of public policy for the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors and director of government affairs and public policy for the American College of Physicians.
- Valerie Krist, graphic designer for ACEsConnection and ACEsTooHigh, as well as for our logos and weekly newsletter. She will provide design assistance for group pages, so that when ACEsConnection moves to Ning 3.0 -- our community of practice social networking platform -- groups can design custom pages. She’ll also be creating infographics based on selected articles.
- Sylvia Paull, a well-known network marketing strategist, will develop marketing materials, strategic partnerships, outreach strategies, and new distribution channels for our content. She aims to help us grow this movement and looks forward to hearing everyone’s ideas for giving it a great name.
- Joanna Weill, who will join the ACEs Connection Network team as an intern. She is working on her doctorate in social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the experiences and relationships that put people at risk for criminal behavior and recidivism. As an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, she worked at the Rescue Mission of Trenton.
My deepest thanks to all of you – the participants of ACEsConnection who have made our community of practice so useful and inspiring.
Comments (24)