The Children’s Resilience Initiative™ (CRI) of Walla Walla is building the community’s capacity to strengthen families. While adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are devastating to one’s health, CRI has created a model of the community’s services and roads to follow to build resilience. CRI is striving to help those affected and to prevent more ACEs in their community.
The website offers educational materials for Parents, Providers and the Community, and is available in English and Spanish. There is also a link to a short online training course provided by the Washington State Family Policy Council.
Resilience is a protective factor…in fact, many protective factors. Protective factors enable us to counter the risk factors that endanger our health. The website offers 42 ways to build resilience and strengthen families, called the resilience building blocks.
ACEs are experiences that deeply impact a young person and profoundly affect emotional and physical health later in life. ACEs result in actual changes in brain development — changes affect a child’s cognitive, social, and mental health. Learn more about ACEs in English. Learn more about ACEs in Spanish.
CRI aims to create better ways to work through the stress caused by trauma and to help recognize children’s behaviors and build resilience into their daily lives. What does this mean for providers, teachers, and others who work with children? It means a new lens through which to see that the behaviors caused by ACEs can be countered with the building blocks of resilience.
Link to Resource: http://www.resiliencetrumpsaces.org
Organization: Children’s Resilience Initiative
References: Washington State Family Policy Council, Adverse Childhood Experiences: Interviews with the Criminal Justice, Early Childhood Development, Faith, K-12 Public Education, and Public Health Communities, March 2012