A root cause of almost every major challenge New Mexico faces--from opioid crisis and violence to low school achievement and underemployment--is childhood trauma.
The Mission of Resilience Leaders: Preventing the costly epidemic of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and family trauma by providing the city of Las Cruces and all of Doña Ana county with the frameworks, technology, and training to implement a data-driven prevention program with results that include: safe childhoods, successful students, empowered employees, healthy families and resilient communities.
We are sponsoring community forums to educate our lawmakers, agency leadership and all residents about ACEs. Our local outreach includes talking physical neglect, emotional neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and children living in households where adults misuse substances, have mental health challenges, are violent to partners, parents are separated, or a family member is incarcerated.
Most of the public are unaware of ACEs when coming to a forum. Leaving the forum, they understand the root causes of ACEs and how the more ACEs are endured, the more likely one is to have emotional, educational and physical challenges. Of interest to local lawmakers are how these challenges associated with ACEs have financial implications for taxpayers and how the lifelong costs of childhood toxic stress are enormous, as manifested in adverse impacts on learning, behavior, and health.
As we continue to outreach to health, education and business sectors, we share some of the consequences of ACEs:
- ACEs can lead to substance misuse impacting school, work and family life
- ACEs can lead to costly negative medical and emotional health consequences
- ACEs can impact achievement in school and higher education
- ACEs can impact work productivity and the workplace environment
- ACEs overwhelm the child welfare, law enforcement and judicial system
The Resilience Leaders program provide the skills and resources to implement a data-driven and cross-sector prevention strategy through courses and mobilizing strategies.
In our Resilience Leaders course, designed for agency leaders, we focus on the positive economic impact of addressing ACEs by creating a family-friendly community environment and investing in programs shown to empower youth. We connect-the-dots between supporting students with ACEs to ensure higher school achievement, with this leading to employment and self-sufficient families.
Our course includes five lessons: engage, assess, plan, act, and evaluate. Graduates of the course join one of our ten Task Forces, working to improve the quality and accessibility of vital family services shown to reduce ACEs, including behavioral health care.
Resilience Leaders is a results-focused prevention processes that engage all local stakeholders including leadership in city government, county government, school boards, colleges and universities, and health care institutions.
The program is guided by the principles of collective impact, the Data Leaders for Child Welfare continuous quality improvement program, and the strategies outlined in the book Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment.
The program’s local programming is informed by research focused on the social determinants of health: how the conditions in which children are raised impact their physical, emotional and education success. All New Mexico counties will be supported in strengthening systems of safety and care that include access to five survival services (behavioral health, medical/dental care, housing, food and transport) and five services shown to decrease dysfunction and increase family health and student achievement (parent supports, early childhood learning programs, family-centered schools, youth mentors and job training/higher education).
This cross-sector ACEs prevention work, the first of its kind in the state, can ensure children, students and families have the best chance to thrive.
We believe that using a data-driven, cross-sector and systemic strategy to prevent childhood trauma can help prevent high rates of substance misuse, poor school performance, unsafe families, and lack of economic stability that accompany it. Resilience Leaders in committed to achieving groundbreaking results, providing a model to raise the quality of family, community, educational and economic life for all New Mexicans.
For more information about Resilience Leaders, visit www.Rleaders.org or www.AnnaAgeEight.org
Comments (1)