(Becky Haas and Ben Schoenberg, Co-Authors)
A group of like-minded higher education professionals across universities and departments came together on Tuesday, March 23, to explore the impact ACE's and Trauma initiatives have had on campus. This convening was hosted by the East Tennessee State University Ballad Health Strong Brain Institute following their participation in the January CTIPP CAN call which showcased three universities who are doing work around the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACEs).
Among the participants joining this conversation were representatives from Wilmington University-Delaware, East Tennessee State University, Florida State University, Santiago Canyon College, MassBay Community College, Southern Oregon University, UNC-Wilmington University, and other University and College community partners across the country. After each participant gave a brief introduction, Dr. Wally Dixon, Founding Director of the Strong BRAIN Institute posed two questions to the group during this preliminary CURE (Colleges and Universities for Resilience) virtual gathering. He asked each attendee to describe their greatest successes and their greatest challenges during their efforts to spread ACE's awareness, become trauma-informed, and increase resilience on campus.
Individuals on the call expressed a range of common themes in terms of success stories. The most recurrent topics were getting trauma-informed courses and trainings up and running on campus for staff and students, collaborative research efforts across departments and with community partners, integrating and increasing ACE's awareness and competencies for faculty and staff, observing the proliferation of common/neutral language used to describe and express ACE's and their effects, and executive buy-in that influences strategic planning and resources. Sharing success stories led to brainstorming about the group's potential to have break-out sessions in the future to explore specific topics of interest. Potential topics ranged from organizing efforts to develop workplace readiness metrics and standards that integrate trauma informed policies and practice on campus, collaborating through research grants to reinforce and study the efficacy of ACE's mitigation and surveillance efforts, and developing general trauma informed policies.
Common denominators also emerged as the group pivoted to discussing challenges individuals and institutions experienced getting their efforts off the ground. Interestingly, some on the call expressed appreciation for joining others in Higher Ed to advance this work as they had felt “all alone” in their efforts. The most head-nodding occurred while deliberating approaches to sustaining funding and energy for campus-wide initiatives. But conversation also turned to the pros and cons of top-down versus bottom-up approaches, the barriers that arise from misconceptions about what resilience means in a trauma-informed context, and fighting upstream against pathologized interpretations of trauma and ACE's.
The 60 minutes allotted for the Zoom call went by quickly as the group’s enthusiasm was wide-spread. The group decided it would meet bi-monthly and endeavor to identify sub-work groups. It was clear that each faculty member joining the meeting has been focused on implementing resilience science into Higher Ed for several years as well as advocating to raise awareness of ACEs as a social determinant of later life health outcomes and disparities within their respective communities. It was evident to all that CURE will serve as a learning incubator to help accelerate the Higher Ed mission for preparing professionals for future generations to come but also generating more resilient campuses.
If you are currently a faculty member of a university or college, or other Higher Ed support staff and would like to be added to the CURE listserv, please contact Ben Schoenberg, Research Services Coordinator for the ETSU Ballad Health Strong Brain Institute at SCHOENBERG@etsu.edu.
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