The California Essentials for Childhood Initiative uses a public health and collective impact approach to align and enhance collaborative efforts to promote safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments for children, youth and families through systems, policy and social norms change.

Join in conversations inspired by Donna Jackson Nakazawa's book, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal. We'll chat about the latest research on how ACEs can affect our health, happiness, and relationships; vent a little; and brainstorm our best ideas for resiliency and healing.

This community is dedicated to advancing PACEs initiatives for Latinx communities, including any individual who traces their roots to Latin America and Spain. We are guided by current scientific research in this area suggesting that stressful and traumatic events among both foreign-born and US-born Latinx often differ from those of US-born/non-Latinx individuals.

PACEs occur in societal, cultural and household contexts. Social science research and theory provide insight into these contexts for PACEs and how they might be altered to prevent adversity and promote resilience. We encourage social scientists of various disciplines to share and review research, identify mechanisms, build theories, identify gaps, and build bridges to practice and policy.

Identify and promote practices that build child caregiver capabilities and improve child outcomes including: the impact of childcare business decisions; building child caregiver skills and resilience; child caregiver turnover; child caregiver ACE histories and healthy boundaries in the workplace.

Connecting and informing the faith community how to integrate PACE concepts into the faith-based community.

How do we honor both lived & learned expertise to break down barriers between parents & professionals? How do PACE-impacted families best access healing, hope & health? How might parent education, training, & support services if co-created with families & in community?

“We have the capacity, within ourselves, to create better health," writes Donna Jackson Nakazawa. We can improve our health no matter what our ACE score. Learn resilience practices that reduce stress hormones in our bodies & brains. Understand how pain, shame & trauma make self-healing harder. Explore research & resources. Share stories, struggles & successes. Practice resilience.

This group explores issues related to adversity, trauma and resilience in the District of Columbia and surrounding areas. We are advocates, trauma survivors, concerned community members, and professionals who share information and develop practical solutions, to support the Washington, DC metro area to become trauma-informed, address sources of adversity, and promote health and resilience.