“Art is a powerful venue through which to have hard conversations,” said Trevor Storrs, President and CEO of the Alaska Children’s Trust, as he was drawing the attention of the crowd at the Church of Love for the opening of Resilience After Trauma: An ACEs Mural Project last week.
It was an accurate description for the nature of the project being unveiled. Steve Gordon, a renowned local artist, art instructor at UAA and creator of the project, explained that it had all started a year ago as he was exploring the opioid crisis and was introduced to a few recovering heroin addicts who came into his class to tell their life stories, so that his students could create mural art projects in response. As he was listening to their stories he discovered that “what was beneath the addiction, in every case, was childhood trauma and toxic stress.” From there, he reached out to find more people who might be willing to talk about what had led them initially into addiction and expand the project to include other local artists. “I didn’t want it to end there though,” he said. “I wanted the murals to also speak to hope, to show that change is possible and you can build resilience in your life.”
In the social services world, those traumas and toxic stress are referred to as Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs for short, which are events in the life of a child that produce trauma and stress at a level that alters brain development. Researchers have discovered an unignorable correlation between the occurrence of intense stress and childhood trauma, and an increased chance of a wide range of long-term health and economic outcomes later in life. The higher your ACEs score, the higher the probability of negative social, economic and health outcomes down the road.
[For more on this story by Aurora Ford, https://www.anchoragepress.com...fe-d305dd83d7dd.html]
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