What Prevention Science Can Teach the PACEs Movement

From Silos to Shared Solutions: Connecting ACEs, Prevention Science, and the Power of PACEs Connection

For decades, people working to improve children’s well-being have often tackled different parts of the same problem. Public health teams have tracked adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), researchers have studied risk and protective factors, and educators, clinicians, advocates, policymakers, and community leaders have built programs to help children and families thrive. Yet valuable knowledge has too often remained separated by professional language, funding streams, institutions, and geography.

The ACEs science gives these sectors a shared language for understanding how early adversity can affect health, learning, relationships, and economic opportunity. And prevention science, in particular, adds an evidence-based way to act on that knowledge by identifying changeable risk and protective factors, using the best available evidence, listening to lived and professional experience, measuring outcomes, and improving them over time. Together, they move communities beyond awareness toward safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments that can prevent harm and strengthen resilience.

PACEs Connection provides the missing ingredient: connection. It brings previously separate individuals, coalitions, and organizations to a common table where researchers can learn from implementation on the ground, practitioners can find evidence and peers, community members can shape priorities, and funders and policymakers can understand what coordinated prevention requires. Shared learning reduces duplication, combines evidence with local knowledge, and helps partners address immediate needs while also changing the policies and community conditions that shape them.

The value of PACEs Connection is therefore more than information sharing; it is the relationships that allow evidence to become collective, coordinated action. ACEs research tells us why early environments matter. Prevention science shows that risks can be reduced and health-promoting conditions strengthened. By helping people find one another, learn together, and act with greater coherence, PACEs Connection turns separate efforts into a prevention ecosystem—and gives more children, families, and communities the opportunity to flourish.