Bo Dean with New Hanover area Community Resiliency Model trainers Audry Hart, the late Chris Johnson, and J'vanete Skiba.
Bo Dean answered the call for monthly donations to PACEs Connection more than a year ago for many reasons, one of the main ones being that PACEs Connection and the work it supports helps us “live into our humanity.”
In addition to his supporting learning and development for some 2200 employees in New Hanover County, North Carolina, Dean also co-chairs the County’s Resiliency Task Force and helped found and support a new resource for people teaching various courses to help increase resiliency in the region, which was devastated by Hurricane Florence almost six years ago.
PACEs Connection CEO Ingrid Cochkren says she wishes more people would follow Dean’s lead in doing the work and in making monthly donations.
“While we’re steadily adding monthly donors, it would be good to see more of our almost 59,000 members -- and hundreds of thousands of visitors -- support our work to prevent and heal trauma," said Cockhren.
She is asking members to sign on now to make a monthly donation to help fund the staff needed to support the site as well as our work with communities, and the newsletters, podcasts, webinars, Resource Center, and other free tools and guides offered by PACEs Connections.
"If just ten percent of our members made an automatic monthly donation of $10, you could help us cover a substantial portion of our costs,” said Cockhren.
Please consider following in the footsteps of community leader and PACEs Connection supporter Bo Dean, who shares below his reasons for making his monthly gift to PACEs Connection.
- Name: Bo Dean
- Occupation: Sr. Human Resource Analyst, Learning and Development, New Hanover County, NC
- Connection to PACEs Connection/PACEs science? We are a trauma-informed/ACES informed county agency and have been working with and informed by ACES, now PACES, for over six years. We began our work by participating in and with the New Hanover County Resilience Task Force, a multi-agency partnership that began as a primary focus on childhood resilience, and still has that as its primary work, but has become a central change agent for building community resilience.
- Do you work in the field? Yes. In my job, I work in PACEs science by using it in all I facilitate. I am the architect for learning and development of professional growth and strategic alignment for our agency for our over 2200 employees. In that work, I have found it essential to permeate our development with foundations of ACES-informed science and understanding in ALL of the work, whether we are looking at individual, team, department, or enterprise-wide learning. The four realms of trauma (as seen in the PACes Connection infographic below) affect our internal and external service, and drive some of the ways we can build compassion and empathy. The science drives the ways we connect to that service, but also how we see one another as we create care and understanding for ourselves to improve our overall well being. It factors into all aspects of how we optimize our service.
- How did you find out about PACEs Connection? We are fortunate to have had Carey Sipp (PACEs Connection director of Strategic Partnerships) as a motivator, teacher, and partner from the very beginning. (Note: Sipp moved to Wilmington, NC, in 2018 to join the New Hanover Resiliency Task Force, learn from its leaders, use the learnings to guide her work with other communities in her role as as PACEs Connection's southeastern community facilitator. Now as the national director of strategic partnerships for PACEs Connection, Sipp continues to learn from the local task force, and plans to stay in North Carolina because she loves it!)
- Were you surprised to find PACEs Connection? Being a witness to so much good in public service, I am constant in awe at what IS done for others. Surprise is not the word I would use. It is gratitude that I have for those who see purpose in using data to drive efficacious practices to help connect us all to better means to serve everyone. In doing this work, we see revelations in the systems and issues that are not at the forefront of all discussions, but are related to living. These have to be addressed and discussed.Some of our folks see and deal with trauma-related challenges on the regular, but don’t always have the ability to articulate their needs and connect with resources. PACEs Connection is not only a connector; it is also a means to voice the validity, the reality of the issues we see, and to help those who want to make a difference to make a difference with a feeling of being supported. It helps those who don’t see these issues in the day-to-day, be able to hear and see it the traumas they might not have seen had they not been made more aware by information received in PACEs Connection.
- What part of PACEs Connection do you like best? The ready access to information that has efficacy, and the connection to others nationally and locally.
- How do you use PACEs Connection? I take the information and deliver it directly to our groups here in the county to help keep us updated. We have a Resilience Working Group that helps permeate the science into our work as well as professional staff. PACEs Connection helps me offer information for ongoing professional development resources.
- Do you read the Weekly RoundUp? Yes. It is the summation that I can give to our leaders. They are inundated with information, but with the RoundUp, they can choose items that they then use for their own purposes. It is clear and concise. Digestible. That is so important.
- Do you share stories from the Weekly RoundUp? Of course!
- Do you belong to a resiliency initiative? I belong to several 😊. I am on the steering committee and I co-chair the NHC Resilience Task Force, which has over 100 agencies signed on! I staff our Resilience Working Group in the NHC government. I founded the Resilience Working Group that is now led by a chair, vice chair and secretary. Its members who have been through the eight-hour Community Resiliency Model (CRM) training. We are a peer support, trauma-informed leadership team. We have over 200 members and meet monthly. We also offer twice-monthly resilience “huddles” virtually for folks to check in and receive support. In addition, we hold eight-hour CRM training sessions each month. I am a CRM trainer and Resources for Resilience (R4R) Trainer.
- What prompted you to support PACEs Connection with your gift? This is the most valuable work I have been involved in. This is where we SEE one another, open up lines of communication, compassion, empathy and support. This is where we lose judgment and find and practice “What happened to you?”NOT “What is wrong with you?” ways of being. The more we do this, the more we see one another and lift up one another, the more we begin to LIVE “What is right with you” and what can we do to celebrate one another.
- What keeps you giving as a monthly donor? All that I said, this work has to continue. Shootings, drag bills, systemic issues that are engineered to separate us in sex and race and orientation, all of these wedges that draw us away from each other are so intentional and purposeful. We need one another. We are our brother’s and sister’s keepers. PACEs science and PACEs Connection allow us to be as one. To know we are not perfect, to know we all experience something and together. Together we heal; we thrive. This is the work of being human and living in that humanity.
- What would you tell others, to encourage them to support PACEs Connection on a monthly basis? I don’t give a ton, but folks, if each of us gave $25 a month, think of the multiplier effect of that! All for less than five coffees a month.
- What is your greatest hope for what happens with PACEs science? That we end child abuse? Create equity? Eliminate racism? Do away with poverty? Create a trauma-informed and healing-centered planet? I said it before. My hope is that we live into our humanity. We can end the issues that challenge us by connecting. We can find, secure and share empathy and compassion. We are human. We are wired for connection and protection even though we have a negativity bias. What we feed the protection and connection, what we share in our experiences, what we give to each other in those connections and sharing will make that difference. We don’t change who we are as biological animals, but we can create better spiritual beings and “human livings” that are connected to the best of what and who we are.
Dean encourages fellow members of PACEs Connection to join him in making a monthly tax-deductible donation to PACEs Connection here.
One-time donations are encouraged as well!
If you'd prefer to mail your gift rather than give it online, here's how... Make check payable to:
TSNE (Third Sector New England, our fiscal sponsor) and write PACEs Connection Donation on the memo line.
Mail check to:
PACEs Connection, c/o TSNE, 89 South Street, Suite 700, Boston, MA 02111
Making a wire transfer or need Tax ID information?
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