Hello,
I’m Teri Schmidt and I am working with Collective Impact in Rapid City, SD. We are a city/community wide organization that is working on a project to understand the ACEs science, as it pertains to our area, and how we can use that data to help make our city a trauma informed community. We are fairly early in the process, and we have been asking other communities about how they started their ACEs and Trauma Informed projects. This is a similar request to all of you who have already launched your project, and may have some words of wisdom for us! If you wouldn’t mind answering two questions for us, that would help us a lot. 
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- If you have done studies to see how much a trauma informed community would save your state/locale, what kinds of an organization did you hire to do that sort of analysis? Can you tell me a little bit about how you found your economists/analyst,etc, and how you went about getting their study going? How long did it take in total? How much did that cost? Did you use someone local? National? Do you have any lessons-learned from that process? I was interested in that, as we too will have to justify the benefits of our project in order to get funding, or push legislation.
- Also, I am interested in how your organization measures its success? How do you measure if you are meeting your goals? Do you compare results of your ACEs scores over time? Across sectors? Do you look at sector-specific data (improvement in truancy, etc)? As we may need to do grant writing for funding, that will be one of the things that we will have to justify, is how we can measure the success of our project over time, so I was hoping to get some metrics ideas from communities who have gone before us. Finally, if you have surveys, questionnaires, etc that you use to measure your success, and would be willing to share, that would be wonderful too.
Again, I really appreciate your time and help with our project. You may email me at the email address below, or simply answer within this forum. Looking forward to hearing from you on your economic measurables!
Very best regards,
Teri Schmidt
Rapid City Collective Impact
schmidtsinscotland@yahoo.com
