Living in a one-room, 500 square foot box during a pandemic has its positive aspects that include far less time mopping and far more time solving our state’s biggest challenges. I realize my “turning lemons into lemonade” philosophy may not be for everyone, but allow me to explain. Back in March, when the governor’s first press conference announcing public health guidelines for pandemic prevention began in New Mexico, I was literally in a Santa Fe conference room in the middle of doing a...

If not you, who? If not now, when? COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020 by the World Health Organization. That was almost nine long, grueling, confusing and deadly months ago. In March, every elected leader in the country, including our mayors, city council members, county commissioners, school board members, state senators and representatives and all member of congress should have been focused on answering the following ten questions in order to develop a national, state, county...

Amid the chaotic three-ring circus called a national election that may take days, weeks or months to conclude, we voted for the person best qualified to make the USA the best place to be a child. You. By voting, we don’t mean choosing who was on the ballet. Sure, we know how important our elected leaders are on the city, county, state and national levels are. In our work, devoted to ensuring that childhoods are safe from adverse childhood experiences, trauma and social adversity, our entire...

For those of us committed to preventing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), our work keeps getting more challenging each day. We know from our 100% Community surveys that our parents struggle to access the basic services of survival: medical care, mental health care, food security programs, housing security programs and transportation to vital services. This means the children and teens we work with face not only abuse and neglect in the home, but social adversity once they step outside...

Remember those scenes in Hercules movies where the hero battles the multi-headed dragon called a hydra. You cut off one head and more appear. It took every ounce of creativity and strength for Hercules to defeat all those twisting heads. That pretty much describes life in the US today. It's just one crisis after another. Heroic people battle what we call three-headed hydras, people guided only by apathy, envy and fear. They are the so-called leaders that have allowed a pandemic to grow. We...

SCIENCE AND COMPASSION The 100% Community initiative is a radically simple data-driven strategy to address the root causes of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and social adversity. Science guides this vital process. To ensure trauma-free childhoods, we are taking on one of the most complicated challenges facing all fifty states: ensuring that 100% of families have access to the ten vital services for surviving and thriving. We are advocating for this work amid a global pandemic and...

1. We have no national health care system to ensure vital and timely care for all in a pandemic. Actually, we do. It’s called Medicare for those over 65. It’s not brain surgery to see the urgent need for a Medicare-For-All system. If the feds won’t do it, then each state must design their own version (and some states have been working on this for decades). Without a system of care, many of our kids endure health disparities. 2. We have no national plan to ensure all health care providers...

We all face challenges. Some of us are thrust into a public health crisis. For others, they’re born into a world of adversity, trauma and chaos. 100% Community is about how we can finally create systems of health and safety that serve everyone, everywhere. 100% Community is the strategy that finally ensures trauma-free and thriving childhoods. For all children. With the 100% Community initiative, we provide you and your community with the insights to ensure that ten vital services are...

Are we living in a direct-to-video movie? This morning it feels like the nation is trapped in the 2018 film by Johnny Kevorkian called Await Further Instructions. In the film a Christmas reunion takes a very disturbing turn when the family awake to find themselves trapped inside their home. Since wifi is down, the only source of information from the outside world is the television, which prompts the family members to do exactly as it says. Its first message is “await further instructions.”...

Those of us committed to preventing ACEs would like to get back to work at 100%. But before we can refocus on helping our most vulnerable children and families, we can benefit greatly by reflecting on what the virus is teaching us. On earth, we don’t get a global pandemic coupled with social distancing leading to an economic free fall every day. What we did get everyday in the United States, right up until COVID-19 was found menacing, was a society with a long history of social injustice,...

I was on a Zoom call with a group of community health advocates, discussing the pandemic and meeting the needs of our most vulnerable children and families. A young woman said, “I hear people say, ‘We are all in this together.’ I agree. It feels like we are all on the Titanic, rich and poor, going down. But who gets a seat on the lifeboat?” There is so much historical trauma that can keep up apart. There are so many reasons why we must find a way to come together to ensure everyone survives...

When the pandemic hit, all we could focus on was the immediate threat. It’s time to ask, “How are our kids doing?” COVID-19 grabbed the headlines in the US a few months ago and because the viral pandemic first hit older adults, we focused on that population. This makes sense. We saw news images of elders in nursing homes and hospitals gasping for air. We immediately worried about everyone over 60 and rightfully so. We did this because this segment of the population was at risk for severe...

Most of you reading this blog don’t see what I see every day. As you do your best to keep in touch with your network of ACEs prevention partners and to make the day pass without a tense altercation with the boss, the kids, the spouse, the co-parent, the grandma or the “friends” on social media, the fight of the century is going on. Three-headed Hydras vs. the Heroes of Planet Earth. You can’t find it on Netflix. Yet. It’s playing out in video conferencing calls between your elected leaders...

Do we collaborate to ensure the safety of all children, families and community members? Do we stay in isolation and silence, allowing our most vulnerable kids, parents and grandparents to hit the pavement? Which path are you on? Our world is one where our phones, tablets, laptops and desktops all scream for attention, asking us to save humans around the world. One “like” is all any site wants (along with a donation). There’s another way. Allow me to explain. Our hope for surviving this...

Right now our children, families and communities face stark challenges. Pandemics and economic disruptions make once comfortable lives vulnerable, while those already enduring adversity find life impossible. 100% Community, a new book guiding a groundbreaking initiative, is the reset button, providing the roadmap for how we work together in new ways to create local systems of health, safety, education and economic stability. What does COVID-19 have to do with ACEs? The way to prevent the...

We are often asked what do change agents need to know as they start an ACEs prevention project. We respond, “Are you ready for the biggest challenge of your life?” Imagine you wish to take on one of the most complex public health crises in the nation. We’re talking about a costly challenge that impacts children, parents, grandparents, the entire school and higher education system, and ultimately impacts the workforce and local economies. Add to this that the challenge leads to substance...

Your ACEs prevention project, including innovations and projects focused on ensuring that all children, students and families have access to behavioral health care, medical care, stable housing, secure food sources and fully-resourced community schools, will depend on support from local and state leadership. We must start building those relationships thoughtfully, strategically and respectfully. To succeed with your mission to ensure trauma-free and thriving childhoods, consider a very long...

All states want to be family-friendly. It’s an easy slogan to adopt but a much harder reality to arrive at. All states have in common is a long list of challenges that many families face daily. A few of the most alarming include: Addiction to opioids, alcohol and various substances which numb emotional pain temporarily. High rates of childhood adversity, abuse and neglect A public education system that is failing to graduate students prepared for employment in a radically changing job market...

Las Cruces city council member Kasandra Gandara was the first elected leader in New Mexico to reach out to us in our role as advocates for ACEs prevention and co-authors of Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment . After reading the book at the beginning of 2018, Councilor Gandara called us, and it turned into a reunion of three former child welfare workers. We had collaborated years earlier when Gandara was working for child protective services and...

“WHAT ABOUT FAITH-based communities—where are they in your plan?” is a question we have gotten when we describe our ACEs prevention initiative in New Mexico called 100% Community. And, it’s one we are pleased to answer. We are often as ked what role religious organizations have in our work. It is estimated that there are approximately 350,000 religious congregations in the United States, representing a wide range of beliefs. With approximately 350,000,000 people in the country, that’s about...

As our Anna, Age Eight Institute reaches its sixth month of operation in New Mexico, I wanted to share a bit about our work to end ACEs, trauma and social adversity. Through relationship-building, community mobilization and communication, we have been able to do four things: ENGAGE: Convince leaders and the public that we are living within an epidemic of adverse childhood experiences, leading to family and community trauma. INNOVATE: Explain to all stakeholders that changes to systems of...

We took about 140,000 words to say what could have been said in eight: join us in making every child a priority. When we finished our 560-page book 100% Community: Ensuring trauma-free and thriving children, students and families , we realized it all came down to a few words and two little stories. Story One: The story of the river and the bridge There was once a woman strolling along the river’s edge. She heard a cry for help and realized a person was struggling to stay afloat in the rough...

As we were writing our book 100% Community: Ensuring trauma-free and thriving children, students and families , we were honored to have our foreword written by New Mexico state senator Bill Soules, PhD. He captures the urgent need for data-driven and cross-sector ACEs prevention in every county across the nation. FOREWORD “What percentage of our kids can we protect from trauma?” is a question that arises often in my day as I work as a teacher, a state senator and an advocate for students. My...

When ACEs collide with additional social adversity outside the home, our children and youth can face daunting challenges. Social adversity in the form of community violence or growing up in areas where isolation and poverty are the norm, rather than robust services and opportunities, can also diminish every family member. Far from the public eye, academics and health researchers use terms to describe various forms of social adversity. There’s an entire field of study focused on the social...

“What percentage of our children should be traumatized?” This is a question New Mexico state senator Bill Soules is asking his fellow lawmakers. He believes 100% of children, students and families should be trauma-free. The senator has been the strongest advocate for our Anna, Age Eight Institute in Santa Fe and our 100% Community initiative focusing on the data-driven prevention of ACEs and childhood trauma. 100% Community is New Mexico’s first data-driven, cross-sector and county-focused...

A network news headline came across the internet that caught our eyes: “California’s first surgeon general: Screen every student for childhood trauma.” The quote was attributed to one of the strongest advocates for addressing the epidemic of childhood trauma, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. An American pediatrician, Dr. Burke Harris is the first and current surgeon general of California and is known for linking adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress with harmful effects to health later on...

Here are ten tested steps that guide our 100% Community initiative focused on the data-driven and cross-sector prevention of ACEs, trauma and health disparities. The ten steps are those taken by local stakeholders as part of the 100% Community initiative. Action teams will choose to focus on one of ten family-focused sectors, following the key phases of continuous quality improvement which include: assessment, planning, action and evaluation. We seek improvements in all ten sectors, from...

The Anna, Age Eight Institute for the Data-Driven Prevention of Childhood Trauma and Maltreatment launched July 1, 2019, part of Northern New Mexico College. We seek to serve as a catalyst for ensuring the health, safety, resilience and education of all our families, which is how we will measure the success of each community, city, county and across the state. We strive to create best practices models, provide critical resources and advocate for policies that result in ensuring the quality...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are a huge threat to our students, diminishing their capacity to learn and succeed. In all thirty-three counties of New Mexico, an epidemic of trauma exists, spreading like a virus as it is passed down generation after generation. We know from the research that our students suffer when they endure ACEs in the form of abuse, neglect, hunger, and living with parents who misuse substances, are violent, and have untreated mental health challenges. We know in...

The hypothesis in our book Anna, Age Eight is that if communities ensure that all families have access to ten vital services, we will significantly decrease ACEs and increase health, safety and resilience. One of those sectors is youth mentors. What follows is our book’s segment of the vital role of a mentor in the life of a child. Good youth mentors take on a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi role, minus all the violence and interstellar travel. They can throw a psychological lifeline to kids in this...

The young girl, Anna, described in our book, Anna, Age Eight, lived a life cut short by the most extreme forms of trauma. The story of Anna begs the question: Why are our children being traumatized? We all realize that life isn't perfect. Chances are, you endured various forms of adversity as a child. Some of it could be shrugged off as, “tough times I got through.” But for many children, these tough times evolve into daily forms of abuse and neglect that continue to haunt them through...

Dear Oprah: Please forgive my rather unconventional way of reaching out to you. It has been almost twenty years since we met and you created an entire program around my book series Ten Talks Parents Must Have With Their Children – focused on parent-child communication to promote healthy relationships and keeping children safe from violence and drug misuse. After my appearance on your show, I became the developer for a ten year national campaign called “Can we talk?” funded by the Centers for...

It's time: Time to act. Time to make history. Time to end childhood trauma. Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, doesn't just impact the majority of our young children in New Mexico. The trauma associated with ACEs affects students of all ages: from kindergarten through high school; even following many teens as they struggle with college. For our children, trauma results from experiences of: physical and emotional neglect; physical, emotional and sexual abuse; and living in households...

In our book Anna, Age Eight , which focuses on preventing childhood trauma, we have a full chapter devoted to trauma-free kids and the promise and perils of technology. The good news is that the technology at our fingertips today can vastly improve the prevention of adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. There are ten ACEs that include: physical and emotional neglect; physical, emotional and sexual abuse; and living in households where adults misuse substances, have mental health challenges,...

Childhood trauma is at the root of many challenges New Mexico faces: from the opioid crisis, to community violence to poor school achievement and unemployment. This makes childhood trauma an expensive problem, forcing state legislators, city mayors, council members, county commissioners and school board members to divert valuable tax dollars to deal with the impact. But it doesn't have to be this way. We have identified the problem and we have the solution. In fact, the causes of childhood...

Safe families produce successful students and thriving communities. Unfortunately, across our towns and cities, family households are not places where all children are safe. Instead, children endure adverse childhood experiences—or ACEs. There are ten ACEs that include physical and emotional neglect; physical, emotional and sexual abuse; and living in households where adults misuse substances, have mental health challenges, are violent to partners, parents are separated, or a family member...

In the interest of keeping a dialogue about ACEs on track, let’s be clear that all of us collectively allow unsafe childhoods, filled with adversity, to remain a standard feature of these United States. We do not control the actions of one broken person doing harm to one child, but we do influence the surrounding environment that is the single biggest predictor of whether the harm will come. Change will arrive only when we who are ultimately responsible for the situation demand it. What on...

No, we don’t need the president nor congress. We do need the following people in your county to stop business as usual and focus on preventing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). City mayors City counselors County commissioners School board members These local elected leaders—many of them your neighbors and colleagues—have the capacity to collectively understand the emotional and financial costs of ACEs and trauma. We can’t have family-friendly cities and counties while we live in an...

Every student should have the opportunity to learn and succeed. But adverse childhood experiences — or ACEs — get in the way of this goal. As our readers know, there are ten ACEs that include physical and emotional neglect; physical, emotional and sexual abuse; and living in households where adults misuse substances, have mental health challenges, are violent to partners, parents are separated, or a family member is incarcerated. ACEs can impact students’ capacity to learn, leading to poor...

I received the following essay from my colleague Bill Soules, PhD a week ago. Dr. Soules is a New Mexican state senator and educator—a champion working to prevent adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). I am publishing his article, a call to action, with his permission. —Dominic Cappello Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), such as abuse, neglect, and witnessing experiences like parental conflict and substance abuse, have been found to have devastating effects on the future health and...

A root cause of almost every major challenge New Mexico faces--from opioid crisis and violence to low school achievement and underemployment--is childhood trauma. The Mission of Resilience Leaders: Preventing the costly epidemic of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and family trauma by providing the city of Las Cruces and all of Doña Ana county with the frameworks, technology, and training to implement a data-driven prevention program with results that include: safe childhoods, successful...

Finally, we can all agree that the following are bad: Child abuse and neglect The opioid crisis and other substance misuse Children dropping out of school Adults losing their jobs and income Parents hurting one another while their kids watch People with untreated mental health challenges raising kids Adults misusing alcohol when they should be parenting Cities without services to keep children safe from harm Schools without resources to help students with challenges Elected officials...

I have seen a future where ACEs is history. Allow me to back up two years to explain. As the last election was “called”, I made an oath then and there: my addiction to hourly updates from my media news sources would end. My so-called morning ritual of coffee and keeping abreast of the topical events—as viewed through the lens of media producers and publishers—was over. Keeping Up Versus Feeding Purpose When I told my friends about my decision there were concerns and I was asked, “But how...

Let’s make this an easy assignment: We believe that America can take a huge step forward with the prevention of ACEs and trauma by helping school boards develop ACEs policy. This policy would articulate how a school identifies students with trauma due to ACEs and provides the help they and their parents need. The policy would also educate all school staff about ACEs and create a trauma-informed learning environment. Some readers might be thinking, “School boards are not ready to take on ACEs...

1. WHO? 
 Those who believe every child deserves to grow up safe, healthy and empowered to succeed in school. 2. SAYS WHAT? 
 Our students and families are traumatized. They need family-friendly services to survive, heal and thrive. We need a strategic plan at the state, county, city and school board levels to prevent and treat high rates of ACEs and trauma. We must look at the root causes of ACEs in order to make measurable and meaningful progress. 3. TO WHOM? School board members and...

Ivan has an ACEs score of 8 and he's failing in most of his classes, described as "a lazy student who won't do the work." In fact, he lives with a troubled family struggling with mental health challenges. We adults must acknowledge the contradiction between the espoused views that all students deserve the chance to study hard and succeed, and the reality that so many students are traumatized by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), diminishing their capacity to achieve in school. Students...

We all say, "We care about our kids—after all, they're our number one priority." But shouldn’t we test that sentiment? To back up our words with actions, why don't we pass a law to make our commitment to every child real? All kids get a card—the Kids-Are-Priority-One card—and they can show it to ensure that they receive: vital services like medical and dental care behavioral health care to address trauma transport to support services and recreation tutorials at school to succeed at learning...

Colleges can play a vital role in ending the epidemic of childhood trauma. We are piloting our two ACEs prevention programs (one in Las, Cruces, New Mexico and one in Owensboro, Kentucky) in partnership with Eastern New Mexico University-Program of Social Work. We are often asked what a college community partnership brings to the implementation of a citywide ACEs prevention project. We would like to offer ten reasons why colleges are poised to be effective centers for the data-driven...