
(l to r) Anna Sutton, Yolo County Maternal Child Adolescent Health; Nadine Burke Harris, Center for Youth Wellness; Gail Kennedy, ACEs Connection Network ___________________________________________
By Jeremy Loudenback, ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
Last week, a coalition of California child trauma advocates gathered in San Diego to advance a platform that seeks create policy change in the state and capitalize on a shifting climate around criminal-justice reform.
The meeting was convened by the San Francisco-based Center for Youth Wellness (CYW), a pediatric clinic that has emerged as an organizing force in the effort to make systems better address early childhood adversity. The Center’s work is grounded in the findings of the landmark 1997 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study that connected early experiences of trauma during childhood and subsequent health issues later in life.
The San Diego gathering comes on the heels of the first summit on ACEs, held last year in San Francisco. After that meeting, an ACEs Policy Working Group met throughout the year with the goal of developing a common policy agenda that will help support the push for an increased focus on child trauma across many different child-serving sectors including health, juvenile justice, child welfare, early childhood and education, as well as within business, nonprofit and philanthropic communities.
As part of that work, CYW in September released the Children Can Thrive: A Vision for California’s Response to Adverse Childhood Experiences report, which described broad recommendations for preventing and responding to child trauma. On Thursday, CYW unveiled the following seven strategies they hope will guide similar efforts across the different sectors over the next three years: