Emily Clary is responsible for helping develop and coordinate the ACE Interface training and Self-Healing Communities partnership with the Children’s Mental Health and Family Services Collaboratives across the state. 

Emily holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor’s of Arts Degree in Sociology from Beloit College. 

Emily is deeply committed to sharing research about Adverse Childhood Experiences and promoting strategies to build resilience and protective factors in communities across Minnesota. She is thrilled to support the MCCC team as it works to fulfill its mission!

Could you give a brief summary of the work you’ll be doing around ACEs in Minnesota?

As the Director of ACE Collaborative Partnerships, I will help MCCC team develop and implement the Children’s Mental Health & Family Services ACE Collaborative Partnership, in conjunction with DHS. My primary role will be to help coordinate and deliver training about ACEs, and to promote strategies that build resilience and protective factors to Collaborative partners across Minnesota.   

 As the new Director of ACE Collaborative Partnerships, what do you want to contribute to the organization?

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to join the MCCC team!  I am deeply committed to the mission of the organization and excited to contribute my energy to the ACE Collaborative Partnership.  Through this work, I will support practitioners, community members, and parents as they build their capacity to adopt trauma-informed practices and strategies that promote resilience and build protective factors in their personal lives, organizations, communities.

 How has your life been impacted by learning about ACEs?

From 2009 to 2015, I worked as the Jail Programs Outreach Coordinator and Program Developer at the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota. In this role, I had the opportunity to learn about ACEs from Karina Forrest-Perkins in 2014. Ms. Forrest-Perkins helped me understand that the human brain can build resilience to ACEs, and further explained that there are ways to build resilience and protective factors into systems to support people who have experienced trauma. Her message gave me hope that individuals have the capacity to lead healthy lives, despite exposure to toxic stress and trauma, and helped me understand that there are way to reduce and mitigate the harm of ACEs.

This information inspired me to develop a trauma-informed Relapse Prevention class for incarcerated clients at the Dakota County Jail. The focus of the class, facilitated by Ms. Forrest-Perkins and her husband Jack Perkins, was to provide an overview about ACEs, the risk factors associated with ACEs, a user-friendly explanation of how toxic stress affects brain development, and a review of strategies that individuals can use to reduce the harmful effects of their ACEs in their personal and family lives. They emphasized to the incarcerated men that learning about the brain science related to ACEs did not excuse them from harming others, and they noted the criminal justice system would continue to hold them accountable for their actions, regardless of how many ACEs they experienced in childhood. They urged the men to think more deeply about the ways they react to toxic stress and encouraged them to use information from the class to better understand and control their own triggers and negative behaviors instead of resorting to violence or other unhealthy behaviors in high-stress situations.

Many of the men who attended the Relapse Prevention class reported that they were transformed after learning about ACEs. For the first time, some men forgave themselves and said they could release some of the shame they carried because of their own experiences with ACEs in childhood. Others revealed they had experienced ACEs and shared how they were unintentionally continuing to perpetuate the harm that they experienced as children in their own families as adults. Many of these men expressed a desire to break the cycle of trauma in their children’s generation. Observing the reflections of the men in the trauma-informed program at the jail gave me insight about the urgency of educating others about ACEs, especially those most affected by ACEs, and it showed me the power of the message of resilience. 

In 2015 I enrolled in graduate school at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota because I wanted to learn how policymaking could be used as a tool to shift human-services systems towards more of a trauma-informed, prevention-focused approach.  In 2016, I had the opportunity to intern with the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) in the Children & Adult Mental Health Divisions, and supported Ann Boerth with data analysis for the Minnesota Children’s Mental Health Collaboratives and Family Services Collaboratives.  In 2017, I developed a professional paper called Walla Walla, Washington’s Community Response to Adverse Childhood Experiences: A Case Study & Lessons for Minnesota, which was written to inform the implementation of the ACE Collaborative Partnership.  In August 2017 I will earn my degree in Public Policy, with a minor in Program Evaluation.  

Is there anything else you would like us to know?

Although I was exposed to few ACEs as a child, I recognize that many of my friends, family members, and the incarcerated men from the Dakota County Jail who I used to work with have not been as fortunate. I wonder how the lives of those who have experienced ACEs could have been improved if they had the opportunity to attend trauma-informed schools or receive services from trauma-informed mental health, education, and public health systems where practitioners asked children not “what’s wrong with you?” but “what happened to you?”  This question has served as the impetus for my continued commitment to spreading the word about ACEs.

I can be reached at eclary@pcamn.org