The Children & Youth Planning Board Launches Louisiana’s First ACEs Connection Website
The Children & Youth Planning Board Launches Louisiana’s First ACEs Connection WebsiteInternational ACEs platform supports New Orleans to become more trauma-informed and healing-centered city; CYPB invites over 800 New Orleanians to join effort.
NEW ORLEANS, LA, October 28, 2020– The Children & Youth Planning Board have launched the New Orleans ACEs Connection website, which will serve as the go-to community hub for those committed to making New Orleans a more compassionate, equitable, and healing-centered city by using the knowledge of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and other evidence-based, positive youth development approaches.
Alongside the launch, CYPB has invited 800 New Orleanians to join the platform. The interactive website–which features a blog, resources, calendar, and members portal–serves as a cross-sector space for members to learn, align, inform, and build better practices, approaches, awareness about ACEs science and beyond. Members can customize their experience and engage with others dedicated to becoming agents of positive change. Anyone interested in becoming a member is encouraged to join.
“The New Orleans ACEs Connection website is a beautiful, thoughtful, respectful, and interactive resource that reframes the narratives that we create around people who have struggled under perpetuated systems of inequity in this country, and especially in this city,” said Dr. Allisyn Swift, who serves as the Lead Network Psychologist and Racial Equity Coordinator at FirstLine Schools. “Its strength and hope-centered message centers on the community wealth of our children and families and how we can use experiences to disrupt the cycle of trauma in our communities and lead with compassion, and research toward a healing community.”
The New Orleans ACEs Connection website launch builds on a multi-stage effort to make New Orleans a leader as a positive, youth-development focused, results-oriented city. In 2019, CYPB hosted the New Orleans Summit on Compassion & Resilience. Earlier the CYPB Childhood Trauma Task Force published the Call to Care report, a robust blueprint to becoming a trauma-informed city. In June, CYPB kicked-off the City’s first ever Youth Master Plan, in partnership with New Orleans Youth Alliance (NOYA) and the Mayor’s Office of Youth and Families.
“I am very pleased that New Orleans is becoming more ‘ACEs Aware’ and strengthening our connections to others doing similar work worldwide,” said Dr. Denese Shervington, Founder & CEO of the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies. “However, as we deepen our knowledge of the occurrence and impact of adverse exposures in the lives of children, the most important challenge before us is how to eradicate their occurence from our society, communities and households.”
Though ACEs Connection is an international platform with sites in nearly every US state and several countries across the world, New Orleans is the first Louisiana city to launch a local website. The Louisiana ACE Initiative and the prevalence of childhood trauma in New Orleans remain catalysts for action. “Hopefully we can help to spotlight the trends in our local and the state-wide movement informing policy and practice,” said Karen Evans, Executive Director of the Children & Youth Planning Board. New Orleans ACE’s Connection “is more than just a website, it is a virtual space where resources, ideas, and research about trauma and resilience can be shared to inform and affect systems-level change.” said Dr. Berre M. Burch, Program Director of Project LAST, Children’s Bureau of New Orleans, adding “I am excited to be part of the dissemination efforts and will start by sharing it with my team and our community partners.”