Meeting Notes

March 8, 2016

Attending

Angela Carrasco, UC Davis Hospital

Carolyn Curtis

Kristina Gelardi, UCD Graduate Student, Human Development

Teryn Heckers, UCD Family Medicine

Gail Kennedy, ACEs Connection Network- Northern California Community Manager

Julie Langston, BEAR program and Yolo Resilience Network

Katherine Lehman, Rudolf Steiner College
Shing Long, The Soldiers Project

Imani Lucas, Health Education Council

DeAngelo Mack, Wellspace Health

Donielle Prince, ACEs Connection Network- Sacramento Online Group Manager

Wendie Skala, Kaiser Permanente

Barbara Stern, Rudolph Steiner College

Charles Stollenbach

Kathryn Taylor, Sierra Mental Wellness Group

Introductions

Mindfulness Minute led by Donielle Prince

Announcements

1. Jamie Redford, producer of Paper Tigers, has just premiered the counterpart film, “Resilience”. While Paper Tigers announces, defines, and frames the problem, Resilience offers some solutions. Its focus is on the health care sector. Gail had a chance to connect with Jamie, who is willing to screen the film in Sacramento. With the group’s consent, we will begin planning a screening event.
2. Mark your calendars: Thursday May 12 is an ACEs Connection Network Northern California Conference. The conference can accommodate a few representatives from each working group. Let Gail know if you’d be interested in attending (aces@gmail.com )
3. Impact: Lutheran Social Services is going to train staff on recognizing their own traumas (eg, their own ACE score) as a means to strengthen the staff capacity to serve populations well. This training arose from connections made at our ACEs conference this fall!
4. Imani Lucas: Health Education Council will be submitting a trauma-related grant proposal. If successful, he will look to members of the working group to help shape some aspects of the grant work. A critical component is the ability to attract, and maintain contact with, a cohort of youth over time. Imani will share more about the grant process in upcoming meetings.
5. Wendie: Alternatives to Violence is training 15 new counselors, expanding the reach of this effective violence reduction and prevention program.

Presentations

Wendie: An ACEs overview with Table Top materials. Materials included a pop up banner and a poster board, as well as “stress target zone” stickers for distribution. See Wendie if you’d like to borrow ACEs Table Top materials for a community presentation! Contact Wendie (Wendie.L.Skala@kp.org ) to receive MS Word documents of the graphics to use and adapt for your presentations.

Wendie shared some themes/statements from her recent presentation that we all may consider modifying to our respective sectoral audiences:

• Why does trauma matter in primary care? Trauma leads people to social disarray, everything from low achievement to incarceration. This connection also manifests as physical illness, which was first observed by Dr. Vincent Felitti.
• What heals us? Relationships heal us. Relationship building decreases toxic stress.
• Whole systems change is needed- a cultural shift of American society is needed to bring about changes in how we interact with people, especially vulnerable populations.

Discussion:

Many providers have their own ACEs, that they bring and also that are caused by the stress of their professional obligations in their work with vulnerable populations.

Institutional change must start with working on individual resistance. One approach to mediating resistance is to emphasize its professional benefits: you will better serve and achieve improved outcomes with your target population, when you manage your own stress better.

“Fussy baby” anti-shaken baby syndrome uses the concept of “First, calm yourself”. Strategies are simple, such as reminding oneself to take deep breaths.

Our ACEs community can encourage each other to reflect on our practice in addition to our membership outreach goals.

Building Sacramento ACEs Working Group

Gail: Operations

We are now ready to begin assembling a steering committee and sub-committee workgroups. One of the most important goals is to have representation from every relevant sector.

Suggestion: Look around the room and ask ourselves, who is missing? And begin to seek out and invite professionals from those missing sectors. Each current ACEs member has contacts to invite.

Sub-committee workgroups can be organized by sector and/or by topic. We will start based on interests that emerge.

For committees to thrive, we will need more participants to attend the monthly meetings and help form the committees.

Initial ideas:

Black Male Professionals: DeAngelo, this could be an ideal opportunity to increase participation of black men, by adding a committee focused on black male professionals building trauma-informed practice.

Faith based

Carolyn: One way to develop interest and participation is to bring in speakers by sector. We can invite contacts in the related sector to learn about the featured speaker, as well as learn about ACEs and the overall mission and goals of the working group. This can be a living demonstration of the connection between a given sector and ACEs work. In fact, meetings going forward can be thematic.

Mission Statement

We reviewed the draft mission statement. We would like to post and encourage comments on the post to give feedback to refine the mission statement into its final format. We may designate a Mission Statement and Core Values sub-committee in order not to rush the work.