In 2020, New Jersey, a state with about 9 million people spread over the rural countryside and dense urban areas like Newark, launched a new entity: the NJ Office of Resilience (NJOR). The NJOR is unusual because it is a public-private partnership. It brings together three private foundations as well as the NJ Department of Children and Families to provide community-driven strategies for preventing, treating, and healing from ACEs.
Like a ship’s navigator laying out a course on charts, Dwana Young, a longtime program support specialist for the NJ Department of Child and Family Services, joined the new NJOR team of six as community navigator. Her role is to develop a plan for setting up and funding ACEs healing centers throughout New Jersey’s 21 counties. Her navigation skills come from years of experience serving as as a child and adolescent social worker, but it wasn’t until 2019 that she first heard of the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and related PACEs science (positive and adverse childhood experiences).
The landmark CDC/Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, of more than 17,000 adults, linked 10 types of childhood trauma to the adult onset of chronic diseases, mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence.
The study found that ACEs are remarkably common — most people have at least one. People who have four or more different types of ACEs — about 12%of the general population, but more in communities with people of color who are poor — have a 1,200% higher risk of attempting suicide and a 700% higher risk of becoming an alcoholic, compared with people who have no ACEs. Many other types of ACEs — including racism, bullying, a father being abused, and community violence -- have been added to subsequent ACE surveys. (PACEs Science 101; What ACEs & PCEs Do You Have?)
The epidemiology of childhood adversity is one of five parts of PACEs science. The other parts include how toxic stress from ACEs affects children’s brains, the short- and long-term health effects of toxic stress, how toxic stress is passed on from generation to generation, and research on resilience, which includes how individuals, organizations, systems and communities can integrate PACEs science to solve our most intractable problems.
When she joined the NJOR team and met Dave Ellis, executive director of the NJOR and a well-known PACEs advocate, Young became a passionate believer in PACEs science. Furthering her passion was the TED talk about ACEs by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, California’s surgeon general. After that, she said her commitment to becoming a PACEs advocate “snowballed.”
Immediately, Young undertook rigorous training with Ellis and other national experts to become a trainer about NEAR science -- neurobiology, epigenetics, adverse childhood experiences and resilience. This past year and a half, during the COVID-19 lockdown, she’s presented regular virtual trainings in all 21 New Jersey counties. The three-hour sessions, based on curriculum developed by Laura Porter, are free to the public. With Porter’s help, Young has been able to train close to 100 people and offer licenses so that they could in turn train their own staffs.
In her trainings, Young stresses the importance of community engagement. “We need to sit in the community and be led by folks in the community,” she says.
One community with which she has been engaged for many years is the Native American tribes in New Jersey. “We have a Native American Commission, where the chiefs get together and I listen to what each tribe needs, whether improved water quality, access to COVID-19 vaccines, or mitigating bullying and trauma in school.”
Teachers are another community having to deal with COVID-19, a trauma the entire nation and particularly our children have faced. “When kids return to school, COVID will be an ACE. Children are missing some of the soft skills such as how to sit down and how to raise their hand to ask a question. Are teachers prepared?
“The teachers union is providing ACEs training so that teachers will be better prepared when they return to schools after a 19-month shutdown,” Young said. “We at NJOR are collaborating on helping them navigate through this traumatic experience.”
From her own experience working with children at summer camps and as a resident advisor while at college, Young knows that “Toxic stress and trauma can be very subtle.” Understanding ACEs “helped me learn about myself and the communities I’ve grown up with in NJ,” she said. “It has contributed to my view of the world and all the work we still have to do together.”
Although she grew up in a small family in Jersey City, Young had many close cousins and called her friends from grammar school “my extended family.”
“I have a heart for young people and for families,” she says. That’s what led her to pursue a bachelor’s in humanities with a concentration in counseling and human services at Montclair State College and then a master’s in public administration at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Both schools are in New Jersey.
New Jersey -- known as the Garden State -- is also unusual because the governor and his wife are supporters of PACEs initiatives. With private funding from three major foundations and the expert navigation skills andpassionate support of Dwana Young, NJOR is three years ahead of its schedule to get the entire state ACEs-informed and promote healing centers designed for and by the communities that need them.
For more information about the NJ ACEs Action Plan and NJOR, see this site.
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