Educating the community about trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) was identified by the Substance Use Prevention Alliance (SUPA) as an action that, when combined with other actions in our community, has a reasonable chance of making a difference in substance use and mental health in our community. Our focus on trauma and ACES will include forming a Building Resilient Communities (BRC) group, helping organizations adopt a Community Resilience Plan and helping school staff to be trained about ACES.  ''BRC addresses upstream toxic effects of ACES and promotes an integrated, multi-pronged approach focusing on de-fragmenting childhealthcare delivery systems to build strong healthcare-community partnerships that develop common goals and shared work plans.''  This is a new program in our community.

The priority population/customers for education about trauma and ACES are school staff.  The communication efforts include stakeholders.  Stakeholders include local government officials and community members.  This community education program aims to make a difference at both individual and organizational levels. Implementation will take place in schools and community organizations, such as faith communities and other non-profit agencies.

This strategy addresses health disparities by increasing awareness of the impact of ACES.  Individuals with an ACES score of 4 or more are more likely to experience physical and mental health problems, including a substance use disorder (Burke Foundation, 2021).   

2020 Update:

• Resilience film screenings were not held due to COVID-19 safety concerns.  
• Haywood Connect, the community's ACES and resilience collaborative group, met in a virtual environment for most of 2020.  In May 2021, Haywood Connect offered a train-the-trainer session for its members, empowering the group to educate their community about ACES and resilience (Haywood Connect, 2020-21).  

The partners for education about trauma and ACES include:

Evaluation Plan:

We plan to evaluate the impact of trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) education through the use of Results-Based Accountability™ to monitor specific performance measures. We will be monitoring How Much, How Well and/or Better Off Performance Measures. Performance measures are: the number of community members and stakeholders attending screening events; number of community members who participate in a Building Resilient Communities (BRC) group, number of organizations who adopt the Community Resilience Plan and the number of school staff who complete ACES training sessions.  Our 2018 Community Health Assessment phone survey collected ACES data from adults in Haywood County.  We will communicate with partners at the WNC Health Network to express the importance of this data and our desire to see follow-up data in 2021.  

Sustainability Plan:

The following is our sustainability plan for trauma and ACES education: 

• Sustainability Component:
  • Several resources, such as the Resilience film and BRC toolkit, are available to our community at no cost.  This will assist our community in offering education on a long-term basis.   
  • Training school staff will help Haywood County Schools achieve the goal of becoming a trauma-informed school district.  
  • Sustainability will be achieved by organizations adopting the Community Resilience Plan, as this will become part of organizational procedure.  
  • By assessing program performance measures, we will be able to determine the efficacy and successes of the program.  This will allow us to communicate with stakeholders and continue to build community support.