Understanding ACEs: Building Self-Healing Communities

Presenters are ready to educate, empower and connect!

To augment the Understanding ACEs curriculum, we recommend increasing community awareness through public film screenings that address ACEs science and trauma informed care.  Through the SD ACEs and Resiliency program, we can help you plan a community screening to introduce a larger, more diverse audience to the science of adversity and community resilience.

“The child may not remember, but the body remembers.”

The original research was controversial, but the findings revealed the most important public health findings of a generation. RESILIENCE is a one-hour documentary that delves into the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the birth of a new movement to treat and prevent Toxic Stress. Now understood to be one of the leading causes of every- thing from heart disease and cancer to substance abuse and depression, extremely stressful experiences in childhood can alter brain development and have lifelong effects on health and behavior.

However, as experts and practitioners profiled in RESILIENCE are proving, what’s predictable is preventable. These physicians, educators, social workers and communities are daring to talk about the effects of divorce, abuse and neglect. And they’re using cutting edge science to help the next generation break the cycles of adversity and disease.

Paper Tigers follows a year in the life of an alternative high school that has radically changed its approach to disciplining its students, becoming a promising model for how to break the cycles of poverty, violence and disease that affect families.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are stressful or traumatic events that happen in childhood. The CDC Division of Violence Prevention, in partnership with Kaiser Permanente, conducted a landmark study from 1995 – 1997 with more than 17,000 participants known as the ACE Study. What we know from the ACE Study and subsequent research is that children who face traumas such as abuse, neglect or witnessing domestic violence are much more likely to develop social, emotional and behavioral challenges. Research also demonstrates that traumas often follow children well into their adult lives. Adults who have experienced childhood trauma are more likely to develop difficulties with substance abuse, mental health, divorce, holding down a job, parenting, domestic violence and incarceration. Childhood trauma survivors also develop serious health issues such as heart disease, chronic lung diseases, diabetes, obesity and cancer.