Mendocino ACEs Community Resilience Team joins PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities

PACEs Connection is excited to announce that Mendocino ACEs Community Resilience Team has joined the Cooperative of Communities!

Mendocino County elicits visions of the rugged Northern California coastline, rolling hills studded with oaks and pear trees, and redwood forests. The rural, vast county, with 3,870 square miles, is nearly the same size as Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

As advocates for children and savvy strategists, Sheryn Hildebrand and Patrice Mascolo are changing the landscape for families living in and around Mendocino County. Hildebrand is executive director of CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates of Mendocino & Lake County) and Mascolo is program manager of Healthy Mendocino, a web-based data repository and central hub for cross-sector collaboration to improve community health. Hildebrand’s tenacity is evident in her willingness to bring up complex issues during public meetings, such as asking the local Board of Supervisors for support from local cannabis taxes to support their family resource center network.

Mascolo convened agencies from across the county who developed a Community Health Needs Assessment. Organizations that participated included not-for-profit hospitals, Mendocino County Public Health community clinics and others. Leveraging the Title V requirement for state and local Maternal, Child & Adolescent Health Departments and, the IRS requirement for not for profit hospitals, provided a convening opportunity where relationships could develop, which are essential to communities being able to solve their problems.

Together Mascolo and Hildebrand have a deep understanding of the unique needs of children and families living in Mendocino County. They focus on authentic engagement, and collaboration. Including six neighboring counties enables greater coordination and shared use of resources and leadership.

Engaging community members and key stakeholders are a significant part of their efforts. The Healthy Mendocino Roundtable quarterly meetings focus on specific discussion topics. The meetings draw 28-30 people and include CEOs, decision makers, leaders throughout the county representing multiple sectors and multiple agencies. The meetings offer opportunities for important conversations among a diverse group of stakeholders where they can formulate next steps and strengthen community cohesion and shared understanding.       

In response to the 2016 Community Health Needs Assessment, Healthy Mendocino developed a number of action teams to address priorities. One of those priorities was to facilitate more community cohesion. Recently, Hildebrand and Mascolo facilitated the merging of the Childhood Trauma Action Team with the Children’s Action Committee to create the Mendocino ACEs Community Resilience Team. Last month, that group joined the PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities to take advantage of the Coop’s tools, trainings and participation in a collaborative community where Coop affiliates can share information and resources.

The first step that the new Mendocino ACEs Community Resilience Team took was to obtain signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) from community leaders and partners. This paves the way for the community’s organizations to begin using the Coop’s Community Resilience Tracker, specifically the Milestones Tracker that enables organizations to track their progress as they become trauma-informed. Here is an example of another Milestones Tracker from the Fresno (CA) Trauma & Resilience Network, which launched their tracker late last year.

Later, team members will start to track outcomes in selected sectors, such as education and healthcare, to measure their progress in the efforts to reduce the community’s most intractable problems, such as school absenteeism, domestic violence and staff turnover.

Integrating equity, root causes, and intersectionality further informs Hildebrand and Mascolo’s efforts to align and leverage resources, initiatives and programs to improve local health as all agencies and organizations work together to address these priorities.

Join us in welcoming the Mendocino ACEs Community Resilience Team to the PACEs Connection cooperative of communities!