When I first encountered ACEs it was at the first train the trainers event in Illinois conducted by the Illinois Education Association.  Almost all the participants that were there were K-12 educators.  I was there as the president of the Morton College Adjunct Faculty union local.  The meeting was impressive because it developed new tools and an entirely new outlook on how to approach young people.

I, on the other hand, saw something quite unique.  I saw how ACEs might affect societies and institutions as a whole.  It was like standing on a mountaintop and viewing a broad and fertile land that had yet to be explored.  I began teaching ACEs as part of my sociology and family classes.  I developed a pamphlet and single class session presentation on ACEs.  I also broadened the concept of ACEs as an anthro-socio-psycho-physiological phenomena.

The interplay between culture, society and ACEs has yet to be significantly explored.  As an ex agency manager I could see how ACEs would affect senior services, delinquency prevention, union management relations, union organization, management organization, and community development.  As a Southern Illinois University trained community developer I could see the linkages between ACEs community development, the Chicago area project in the 1930s, the Industrial Areas Foundation, and a rural Community Development as taught by Richard Poston and others at Southern Illinois University.  I developed the PowerPoint to show the linkages.

I could not find other sociologists who were exploring ACEs until I encountered Craig McEwan.  Together we started this website ACEs and the Social Sciences in hopes of building a community of social scientists.

I am making this post in an attempt to demonstrate how we can reach out to each other.  I am retired for health reasons but I have retained my interest in building up an understanding of ACEs amongst social scientists.

I hope that others of you would think of doing the same thing so that we could interact with each other.  I conceive of this site as being able to create the kind of links that we would have if we were able to function at an informal get-together at a professional conference.  I learned a lot of new things at those groups.  They were only ideas and concepts at that time but they became formalized later on. Those first thoughts and the interactions we had over them furthered our science.

This site contains a community of social scientists interested in ACEs. We have the capacity to interact with each other on this site.  We have the ability to email each other on this site.  We have the ability to quiz each other on this site.  We have the capacity to zoom meet, (with everyone having a beverage of their choice) to talk to each other.  None of these functions are limited by geography or the cost of travel.

I hope this posting will encourage you to look at this site in a different way and get involved.  Reach me through the site.  Make a personal posting, such as I have done, on the site.  Suggest a topic for a Zoom meeting.

Be Well,

Dennis