Community groups gather to address social issues [Frontiersman.com]

Representatives from local governments, tribal governments, businesses, and community organizations gathered Monday to discuss ways to work together.
Organizers of the Mat-Su Collective Impact Event said the main focus was to find ways to create a collective impact framework, a reference to a specific method of addressing complex and endemic social problems. The easiest way to explain it might be to think of it as a team approach, where organizations with very different missions — governments, businesses, schools, and shelters — collaborate toward a positive outcome.
The target issue for this first conference was child maltreatment, a catchall term for different forms of adversity children can face growing up, ranging from physical violence, to incarceration among adults, to divorce, to recreational drug use.
The scope of the problem was defined by a two-year Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES), conducted on patients of Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, which found adults who reported adversity growing up were more likely to develop long-term health risks, like alcoholism, smoking, illicit drug use, depression, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

[For more of this story, written by Brian O'Connor, go to http://www.frontiersman.com/ne...82-fb2d105a9431.html]