We Support Communities

Map of Community Facilitators

Launching or growing a local PACEs initiative? START HERE to learn about our tools & guidelines:

Start Your PACEs Initiative
Grow Your PACEs Initiative

Communities in:

Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Western states, contact Alison Cebulla

Southern states, contact Carey Sipp

Midwest states, contact Porter Jennings-McGarity

Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, contact Karen Clemmer

Communities in California:

Northern California: Karen Clemmer

San Francisco Bay Area: Donielle Prince

Capitol Region, Central Valley, Central coast: John Dovales Flores

Southern California: Donielle Prince

International communities: Alison Cebulla

START YOUR PACES INITIATIVE!

Community PACEs initiatives are usually launched by a small group of enthusiastic people who make time to meet monthly, who begin to incorporate this work into their job descriptions or their volunteer efforts, and who drive the initial effort. From there, it grows to the point where some PACEs initiatives have hundreds of members and organizations, who do their work through several committees. Here’s how the PACEs initiative in Richmond, Virginia, grew from eight people to more than 500.

We’ve gathered do's and don'ts from dozens of communities that have launched PACEs initiatives and compiled them into a loose how-to with guidelines, useful tools and lots of examples for PACEs initiatives to get started.

For more information, go to Start Your PACEs Initiative! on PACEs Connection and be sure to contact the PACEs Connection Community Facilitator in your region for assistance.

GROW YOUR PACEs INITIATIVE!

This Growing Resilient Communities framework provides the basics for growing any PACEs initiative, and supports incorporating any other approach to growing PACEs initiatives in a community, including PACE Interface’s Self-Healing Communities, Northeast Tennessee's Trauma-Informed System of Care, and the Building Community Resilience Collaborative. Although there are many different ways to accomplish the five parts of Growing Resilient Communities, all of these five parts are critical to the success of any local PACEs initiative. For the detailed version of these guidelines, go to Grow Your PACEs Initiative!

The five basics of growing a city or county PACEs initiative are:

1. Educate.

...every person and every organization about PACEs science, and how people and organizations integrate trauma-informed and resilience-building practices in themselves, their families, their organizations, their systems, and the communities in which they live.

2. Aggregate.

...gather data, such as the number of PACEs science presentations, the number of organizations that are becoming trauma-informed, the resulting outcomes in organizations and sectors, such as higher grades, less absenteeism, and less teacher turnover in schools.

3. Engage.

...people and organizations to join the local PACEs initiative. A little bit or a lot...any involvement is good.

4. Activate...people and organizations to commit to integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices in their personal, family, volunteer, work and community lives. This heals systems and communities!

5. Celebrate

...any accomplishment! PACEs summits, community resilience days, proclamations. Post anything, large or small, that your community is doing on PACEsConnection.com and other social media.

PACEs CONNECTION COOPERATIVE OF COMMUNITIES

Are you an PACEs initiative struggling to measure your progress? Do you want an easy way to gather useful data to demonstrate your growth? Are you ready to participate in advanced learning collaboratives and training? Then you’re ready to join the PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities.

The Cooperative provides special tools and services for PACEs initiatives in neighborhoods, towns, cities, counties, regions, states and countries. It’s affiliate-driven, which means that PACEs initiatives steer the course of the cooperative.

The benefits include:

data-gathering tools and guidelines, including a Community Resilience Tracker. (Here’s the Greater Richmond Trauma-Informed Community Network community site and a direct link to their tracker)
Pop-up learning collaboratives, training, and think-tanks, including such topics as the intersectionality of ACEs, racism and inequity; network leadership; and PACEs-science informed capitalism.
eligibility for participation in cooperative committees and advisory committees.
jobs bank
fiscal pass-through for qualifying funds/activities

Affiliates pay $5,000 a year to participate, an amount that is low enough so that the cost can be shared among organizations and individuals; organizations can take turns paying; initiatives can even crowd-source the funding; and it may not even require a line-item in a budget. Affiliates receive access to tools and services that cost them a fraction of what it would cost to develop those tools and services themselves.

[A clarification: Nothing on PACEsConnection.com itself changes! Membership is and remains free! Everything — the guidelines for starting and growing PACEs initiatives, the presentations tracker, interaction with community facilitators…everything — that our current 300+ communities use is free. And it will remain free for initiatives that want to start communities on PACEsConnection.com. The Cooperative is just for mature initiatives ready to move to the next level.]

Who is eligible to become an affiliate in the cooperative? PACEs initiatives with:

demonstrated six-month history as an PACEs initiative (you don’t need to have had a community on PACEsConnection)
cross-sector representation of at least four sectors (e.g., education, law enforcement, healthcare, faith-based)
a committee responsible for interaction with PACEs Connection, to handle the affiliate agreement, payment, fiscal pass-through, etc.
an MOU or other similar agreement with participating organizations and individual members of their PACEs initiative
at least one community manager, paid or volunteer

We launched this Cooperative because we understand that making the transition to healing-centered cultures based on PACEs science is not a three- or four-year endeavor. Depending on the community, it’s at least a 20-year transition, and more likely, a 30- to 40-year transition, and we want to be here for the duration of the transition.

Big change — change that affects everything — takes time. We have a plan to accelerate this change. By growing the cooperative, we hope and plan for PACEs Connection itself to become self-sustaining in about three years. That, in turn, will enable us to start funding new PACEs initiatives with the small amounts of money they need to get started. Those small amounts of funding are usually hard to come by while an initiative is getting organized; the cooperative will be in a prime position to identify and support nascent PACEs initiatives and give them the boost they need for a healthy launch, faster than most funders can. We also want to create a process and perhaps a fund that will support — and encourage local and regional funders to support — pivotal points in the growth of PACEs initiatives as their work becomes ever more integrated into all organizations in their communities. Both of these approaches will continue to accelerate the PACEs movement. We need to accelerate it. We’re facing some extremely challenging times as climate crises increase. It would make a lot of sense to have people better-equipped to handle these crises and to reduce our current problems so that we have adequate resources to address the new ones.

We and others calculate that under 1,000 ACEs initiatives have been launched in cities and counties across the U.S. There are 34,000 cities and counties across the U.S.; each one needs to integrate practices based on ACEs science if we want to solve our most intractable problems.

We want to continue to contribute to the PACEs movement to grow and support people, families, organizations, systems and communities for as long as it takes to create a worldwide healing-centered culture based on PACEs science. We want that to take hold in this world in the same way electricity has — we only notice it if it isn’t there.

If you have questions, use this link to find your closest PACEs Connection Community Facilitator.

Find all of our PACEs Connection geographic communities

Click on the map to view the interactive Map the Movement map.

coop

PACEs Connection is a social network that recognizes the impact of a wide variety of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in shaping adult behavior and health, and that promotes trauma-informed and resilience-building practices and policies in all families, organizations, systems and communities.