How do you build a narrative around ACEs science, bolster it with data and convince your leadership that integrating it is critical for the community you serve?

Representatives from San Francisco Bay Area health and social service agencies had an opportunity on December 5 to learn about ACEs science, find data sets to help them make a case for supporting ACEs education and resiliency programs, and then role play ways to deliver powerful messages.

Donielle Prince, ACEs Connection Network’s community facilitator for the San Francisco Bay Area, walked participants through a review of ACEs science. ACEs science includes the epidemiology of ACEs (the original CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study and subsequent expanded ACE surveys), how toxic stress from ACEs harms children’s brains, the short- and long-term consequences of toxic stress on health, how toxic stress from ACEs can be passed from generation to generation (epigenetics or historical trauma), and resilience research that includes how trauma-informed and resilience-building practices and policies help solve our most intractable problems.

She highlighted a diagram created by the RYSE center in Richmond, CA, which illustrates the role of racism and oppression in undermining institutional efforts to promote healing from trauma. She also walked participants through ACEs Connection, a community-of-practice social network for the ACEs movement, including the organization’s newly-minted Community Tracker (here’s Sonoma County’s). Communities use the tracker to measure their progress by mapping presentations and organizations that are becoming trauma-informed across sectors.

Steve Wirtz, the chief of the Injury Surveillance and Epidemiology section of the Safe and Active Communities Branch of the California Department of Public Health, described how the state agency is culling data related to ACEs in partnership with kidsdata.org, and showed participants how to access ACEs data from sources, including the National Survey of Children’s Health, the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System and the Maternal Infant Health Assessment survey.

Nathan Porter, data manager for the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, showed people how to navigate through the data available on kidsdata.org, particularly the data related to adverse childhood experiences and resiliency.

Michael Bakal, a communications specialist with the Berkeley Media Studies Group, laid the foundation for developing a pitch around ACEs and resiliency to leadership, legislators and journalists. He stressed the importance of using data to get a message across. The bottom line for any pitch, he suggested, was honing in on one’s core values and answering some basic questions: “What do you want to change? How will you change it? Why do you want to change it? Why does it matter?”

The training, held at First 5 Alameda, brought together 27 people from Alameda, Solano, Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco counties as well as state public health officials.