For the past three years, Karen Bacigalupo, as assistant principal at Fall-Hamilton Elementary, part of the Metro Nashville Public Schools, worked with former principal Mathew Portell to integrate PACEs into their school. Bacigalupo took over as principal last March when Portell joined PACEs Connection as director of communities. Although she had heard about the science of positive and adverse childhood experiences through social media and in her research over the past six years, it was only...

Even though Clay Walker, director of Caddo Parish Juvenile Services in Louisiana, had attended several conferences about adolescent trauma, the first time he heard about the science of adverse childhood experiences was in 2014. His jaw dropped.

BJ (Betty) Adkins shares her passion for helping communities overcome trauma as coleader of a team that is seeding PACEs throughout Kentucky. Starting with a planning grant from the Foundation for Healthy Kentucky in 2012, her team of community stakeholders initiated the Bounce Coalition . Bounce reaches educators, administrators, service providers, and parents throughout Kentucky counties who are adopting the Bounce trauma-informed model. More than 16,000 people have been trained in ACEs...

When she was 47, my grandmother, Symcha Goldberg, was murdered by Nazis either on the cattle cars transporting Jews from the Lodz ghetto to Treblinka, Poland, or in the gas chambers inside the extermination camp itself. We have no reports from those who might have survived the hundreds of thousands who were killed at Treblinka. I have welcomed the addition of historical email signatures designating the Native American tribe that used to occupy the physical space where the emailer now...

Judge Sheila Calloway says she had “absolutely no idea that I wanted to become a lawyer” when she was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. But looking back over her fourth-grade papers, which her mother had proudly saved, she found an essay she wrote in which she said she wanted to be a lawyer and help people. And she has. After stints in the Metro Public Defender’s Office and the Juvenile Court in Metropolitan Nashville & Davidson County, TN, she was elected juvenile court judge in 2014.

Growing up as the eldest daughter in a family of three girls and three boys in Nairobi, Kenya, Becky Ndung’u and all her siblings attended school, which is mandatory for children ages six through 14. Her parents—both farmers and her father also a lifelong government accountant—were committed to providing all their children a good education. Her education began in a public school, followed by a private high school. Our conversation was conducted in English, but Ndung’u is also fluent in her...

It took eight years for Mathew Portell to get an undergraduate degree. Not sure what to major in, the self-described, “free-spirited vagabond” matriculated at more than a handful of colleges and universities throughout the Midwest while working low-paying jobs to support himself. Yet this month, Portell was hired as director of communities for PACEsConnection, where he will help our Growing Resilient Communities and Cooperative of Communities programs find the resources our network provides...

Tom Weidlinger, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, realized his childhood was traumatic when he was a teenager. He tells the story in his memoir, The Restless Hungarian. He was in a car with his mother. She had just picked him up from boarding school where he had been sent after his parent’s divorce. She was speeding and swerved violently off the road. “We almost had a crash,” he said, still shaken by the close call with death. “Didn’t you see him,” his mother asked, “the man...

"The ACE Study made perfect sense to me knowing what I was seeing in the children and teens I was working with as well as with the people in my own community. It was like someone gave me the answers to a puzzle."

The accumulation of multiple environmental risks creates pathways from poverty to low academic achievement and limited upward mobility. This is similar to the ACEs model.

An FBI Special Agent for 23 years, the last three as the Special Agent in Charge of all operations and activities in the State of Mississippi, Christopher Freeze was well acquainted with the pervasive and generational effects of ACEs, or adverse childhood experiences. But during most of his tenure with the FBI, Freeze says, “ACEs was not on my radar at all.” Freeze’s Southern accent belies his roots in Manchester, Tennessee, a small town 50 miles outside of Nashville, where he milked cows...

WANDA BOONE: A RESILIENCE RAINMAKER Wanda Boone, executive director of a North Carolina nonprofit, Together for Resilient Youth (TRY), to combat youth and adult substance use, not only raised three children of her own but also fostered seven children with mental health and substance use challenges. Despite – or perhaps because – of her own high ACEs score, Boone said that early on she decided “my main goal in life was to be a fantastic wife and mother.” She’s exceeded her goal in many ways.

“I was floored,” she says. “I felt understood. I felt heard. I felt acknowledged. It was confirmation that I wasn’t crazy. That what I was going through was actually normal.”

Our interview for this profile took place over two continents, from the U.S. to Lima, Peru, where Lourdes Valdez, pediatrician in Butte County, California, for 23 years, was attending to family affairs after the death of her mother. Valdez grew up in Lima, and later earned her medical degree in Peru before moving to Iowa City, Iowa, in 1992 for her residency. She said her mother helped make her a resilient person. Although working full time as an economist and statistician, her mother made a...

Dr. Flojaune Cofer is an epidemiologist who wants to improve health and prevent trauma, racism, and inequity in communities throughout California. That’s a big charter, but since 2019, as senior director of policy for Public Health Advocates, she’s making progress with a team focused on public health prevention and restorative justice initiatives. Those initiatives include My Brother’s Keeper, for boys and men of color, and All Children Thrive, which works with 20 cities to prevent youth...

Lynnette Grey Bull (l) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Lynnette Grey Bull is founder and director of Not Our Native Daughters , a nonprofit created to educate and raise awareness of the missing, exploited, and murdered Indigenous women and children in the more than 300 tribes across the U.S. Grey Bull was raised in Pasadena, CA, where her parents, who met in college, had settled after leaving Billings, Montana. “I had great memories there,” she recalls. Her mother is Northern...

If Jamaican poet, children’s book author, and appointee to the nation’s Task Force on Character Education, Juleus Ghunta had his way, all 44 million people living in the Caribbean—from Barbados to Guyana to Grenada—would become PACEs-informed in the near future. To start off, everyone—including children, parents, teachers, social workers, doctors, and policymakers—needs to read his new book, Rohan Bullkin and the Shadows: A Story about ACEs and Hope , due out this December, just in time for...

Mary Ann Hanson grew up in Fortuna, a former lumber town situated on the Eel River in Humboldt County and a gateway to centuries-old redwoods into the Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Humboldt is also one of the two California counties with the highest percentage of residents whose ACE score is 4 or more. Hanson herself has an ACE score of 8. Given her roots in Humboldt, a mostly rural county with a population under 150,000, and the difficulties she faced growing up in a family with substance...

“I wanted to have access to the parents. If you don’t change what’s happening at home, you don’t change the child’s behavior at school.”

Improving the lives of children is a personal calling for Louisiana first lady Donna Edwards. Before her husband, Gov. John Bel Edwards, took office in 2016, Donna Edwards spent eight years as a music teacher for her local public elementary school. She knew that many children in her classroom faced unknown hardships at home, but she didn’t realize how deeply trauma impacts children in different ways until 2017. That was the year that Dr. Charles Zeanah, a leading authority on adverse...

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...

If one were to spell out the benefits of joining PACEs Connection’s Cooperative of Communities (COOP), there is no better person to ask than Barbara Finch, co-lead for Resilient Santa Barbara County , which was one of the first four affiliates to join COOP. “The biggest benefit,” she says, “is recognizing that you are part of an expansive and growing movement. There are so many different approaches to the work, and every community has its own experience. What we have learned since joining...

Brandon Jones describes himself this way: “I’m a down-to-earth psychotherapist, professor, and family man dedicated to helping those who want to heal.” Jones grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, which has been averaging a police-involved death every year over the past five years . Gun violence in African American, Somali, Latin x and indigenous gangs “have all found a home here in the Twin Cities . ” “George Floyd was the tip of the iceberg,” says the PACEs advocate, psychotherapist, consultant...

Andres Sciolla, a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at UC Davis Medical School, hopes that an expanded version of ACEs becomes completely integrated into the medical profession in the future. By “expanded,” he explains: “Medicine would have to integrate sustainable and practical ways to address social determinants of health,” such as affordable housing, basic income, and access to affordable health care. Sciolla earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Chile...

Dr. Porter Jennings is PACEs Connection’s new Midwest and Tennessee community facilitator. She replaces Ingrid Cockhren, who is now director of PACEs Connection’ Cooperative of Communities and leads the efforts of the organization’s six community facilitators. Jennings spent her junior year in college living with a Spanish family and studying at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she acquired fluency in Castilian Spanish. That’s not the dialect spoken by the Central and South...

Rick Griffin knows a lot about hope – how to understand it, instill it, develop it. Griffin is the director of training and curriculum development for the non-profit Community Resilience Initiative (CRI) in Walla Walla, Washington. Walla Walla’s Lincoln High was the subject of a 2015 film, “Paper Tigers,” by the late Jamie Redford, about how the school principal, Jim Sporleder, adopted an ACEs-informed approach that positively transformed the school as well as the surrounding community.

Natalie Audage, new PACEs family and community resources lead, says her middle and high school education in dictatorships – Aleppo, Syria and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – where her parents were teachers on the international circuit, made her realize that human rights were not universal. That’s why a light bulb went off in her senior year at Princeton University, when the chemistry major took a class on human rights. She realized she could combine her love of science with her desire to help the...

Morgan Vien, the child of Vietnamese refugees and herself a San Francisco Bay Area native, says her ACE score is zero. That’s because she grew up with her parents and a younger brother “in a very safe and nurturing atmosphere.” It wasn’t until her junior year at Santa Clara University, where she earned a B.S. in public health science with minors in sociology and biology, that she learned about adverse childhood experiences — ACEs — in a public health class. That knowledge was...

Fritzi Horstman grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan – not as posh as it is now, she says, but still a respectable, middle-class neighborhood. By the time she was 16, she had become a “juvenile delinquent, doing drugs and running around.” What happened? And why was her ACE score 8, when she finally assessed it nearly 40 years later? Domestic violence underscored her childhood and teen years, she says. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother a “rage-aholic” who abused her and her...

“Mind Matters: Overcoming Adversity and Building Resilience” builds on Carolyn Curtis’s lifetime experience. It is as if she had been predestined to teach people to overcome the adverse experiences in their lives. Like many of us, Curtis grew up in an alcoholic home. This gives her a deep understanding of the damage that comes from early childhood trauma – and a passion for helping others overcome it. Her experience eventually led her to become a marriage and family counselor. After 30...

Pediatrician Tasneem Ismailji is a cofounder and former president of the Academy on Violence and Abuse (AVA). Her Pakistani heritage and love of children have informed not only her career choices but also her decades-long commitment to the prevention of the health effects of violence and abuse. Born in the ancient city of Karachi, Pakistan, Ismailji was one of seven siblings — four girls and three boys — growing up in a loving Muslim family, where she spoke both Urdu and English. In the...

Dr. David Corwin, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, told me an astonishing fact recently: 61 countries around the world have banned spanking and hitting children, with another 50 pledging to do so. But the United States is far behind in addressing this kind of physical violence toward children. And that was just one of three amazing elements of my recent three-hour interview with him. No. 2: It was the longest interview I’ve ever conducted for this site.

(l to r) Elizabeth Smith and Peacetown board of directors: David, Amitiel, Jim aka Mr. Music, and Jasmine. Only eight years ago, Elizabeth Smith was experiencing severe chronic stress. Raising a young son on her own, she was employed as a technician at a county hospital in Northern California that had downsized staff and increased her workload , as well that of other staff. She was helping to raise the morale of her fellow workers and served as a liaison between staff and the administration,...

(l to r) Elaine Miller Karas co-developer of CRM; Jim Sporleder, former principal of Walla Walla High School; and Edwin Weaver at the 2018 ACEs Conference & Pediatric Symposium in San Francisco. After watching the late Jamie Redford’s 2015 film, “ Paper Tigers ,” about a Washington state high school where ACEs integration transformed graduation rates, Edwin Weaver knew he had to take action. Weaver is the executive director of Fighting Back Santa Maria Valley , providing social services...

It wasn’t until his fifth prison term in a North Carolina county jail — his fourth conviction for driving under the influence — that Michael Hayes volunteered to take an ACE survey that changed his life. The 48-year-old father of six sons and one daughter had spent a number of years in and out of prison. During his last term, to get some time out of the cell where he spent 16 hours a day, he volunteered to attend a class offered by RHA Health Services, a nonprofit that incorporates the...

Denise Presnell had been a social worker for public schools in North Carolina for many years before she found out about ACEs. She first learned about adverse childhood experiences during an internship while earning her master’s degree in social work. The experience, she says, was like “those moments of clarity in therapy when the earth moves and the light bulbs turn on.” At first, “I really didn’t want to know my ACE score,” she said. But once she did assess her score – a 9 -- at the request...

Learning about ACEs science changed David Magallon’s life in a profound way — and now he’s made it part of his mission to share that knowledge with other parents who really need it. Since 2017, Magallon has served as a court referral programs manager at the Child Parent Institute (CPI) in Santa Rosa, California. The non-profit agency offers child therapy, parent education, and other resources for families throughout Sonoma County. Magallon works with families in a probation program mandated...

Svensson is no stranger to trauma. She attributes her ACE score of 2 to when her parents, living in Bakersfield, adopted an older, trouble-ridden sixth-grade boy for five years, starting when she was in first grade.

Rafael Maravilla has what seems the ideal academic background for his job as ACEsConnection network manager and community facilitator for central California. Not only does he have a B.S. in neurobiology from University of California, Berkeley, but he also has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UC Merced, thus combining an understanding of human biology with insights into human behavior. He also has an ACE score of 9. The eldest child of a Mexican farmworker who was an alcoholic and not...

A Kansas-licensed social worker, Vanessa Lohf was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, where she still lives and works in public health by facilitating the Trauma-Informed Systems of Care Initiatives (TISC) team at the Wichita State University Community Engagement Institute. She also manages the Kansas ACEsConnection network , where she regularly posts about news and resources for communities and organizations throughout the state. Lohf says that Wichita is known as the “Aircraft Capital of...

You could say that Ann Penn-Charles, a native of La Push, Washington, was a natural resilience builder even before there was an ACE Study. La Push is a Native American reservation on the western edge of Olympic National Park, where the Quileute Nation ancestors of “Miss Ann”, as she is known, have lived for generations. Although she faced hardships growing up on the reservation, including having her first child when she was a junior in high school, she was able to graduate with the support...

Brian Semsem, a pastor based in Fresno, California, who has been working with troubled youth and adults for most of his professional life, says when he first learned about ACEs in 2014 from a colleague in a county foster youth program, “I started seeing numbers over everybody’s head.

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, Dana Kwitnicki, a physician assistant, says she always wanted to be in health care. Her dad is a dentist, her mother a teacher, and she grew up with several other family members also in medicine. Kwitnicki learned about becoming a PA while attending Northeastern University in Boston, MA, where she earned a degree in health sciences. After undergraduate school, she earned a Master’s in Physician Assistant Studies at Philadelphia University through a vigorous...

Grabbe searched for models that would help her homeless and addicted patients. “There are good body-based models for psychotherapy, which may be the most effective approach for trauma,” she says, “but hardly any of my patients were receiving any kind of therapy. There are thousands of people in our communities who have high ACE scores who will never get the years of psychotherapy they deserve. CRM is a self-mental wellness care tool and is exquisitely trauma-sensitive—so it can help enormously.”

Glass’s mission has always been to protect and foster the practice of nurturing children. That’s because she herself experienced at least five types of adverse childhood experiences, as measured in the original CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study). If the scale could account for childhood adversity such as structural racism and community violence that’s more likely to occur in communities of color, her burden of ACEs is higher.

Julie Kurtz hasn’t stopped creating ways to build and promote resilience in herself and others who have experienced trauma since she left her family home for college at age 18. Although she experienced four types of adversity during her childhood, the CEO of the Center for Optimal Brain Integration has traveled a complex journey to mitigate those adversities by recognizing her own internal resilience, building skills to buffer her toxic and traumatic stress, uncovering her voice through...

When California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on March 16, 2020, that child care providers were essential businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, he left the decision to close to each provider. Jameelah Hanif, owner of Watch Me Grow Child Care in Vallejo, CA, decided to close.