After several years of watching and working with communities (cities, counties, states) across the U.S., we heard the appeal for guidelines and tools to help communities start and/or grow their ACEs initiatives. We had originally put together a loose set of guidelines called the Roadmap to Resilience, but a few months after posting that in 2015, it was clear that communities wanted something more. So after about 1.5 years of thinking, talking, testing — we rolled out Growing Resilient Communities 2.0. 

There are two main parts to GRC 2.0. One that focuses on how to organize an ACEs initiative (including the red flags that point to practices that communities have discovered will put a halt to or seriously delay their efforts):

Organizing your ACEs initiative: Steps to growing a resilient community

And the second part — Growing Resilient Communities 2.0 — focuses on what ACEs initiatives do:

• educate their community,
• engage community members in the local ACEs initiative,
  activate every organization to becoming trauma-informed,
• and celebrate their progress by telling their stories, gathering and publishing data, and hosting ACEs summits.

Communities need to measure the progress of their ACEs initiative, so we developed a tool for that. It tracks the presentations a local ACEs initiative does (presenter, date, number of people, organization receiving the presentation, sector and subsector), and the progress of organizations along 11 milestones as they become trauma-informed. 

People who do ACEs science 101 presentations fill out a Google form, and the data from that gets dumped into our database, from which we populate the community’s tracker. To become listed on the community’s organizational tracker, organizations fill out a Google form, and that data also gets dumped into a database. ACEs Connection community facilitators work with communities to update this data monthly. 

The first community to use it is Sonoma County, CA. You can look at Sonoma County ACEs Connection to see their Community Tracker. (We also have developed a planning spreadsheet that captures 95% of the sectors and subsectors in communities, as well as a demographic filter that helps local ACEs initiatives make sure they’re reaching out to everyone in the community.)

These tools are available for any community to use for free. 

We’ll be developing other tools in 2018, including identifying data from one sector that may be a proxy for two or three other data types (e.g., if a trauma-informed school no longer suspends or expels students, there should be a drop in juvenile crime as well as visits by youth to hospital emergency departments). If we can help communities track their progress along five to 10 data types that represent the community’s overall progress toward health, that will be very useful for that community to obtain ongoing support and funding.