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At the Center for Community Resilience, we believe fundamental ingredients for community resilience and wellbeing — interconnected systems, authentic community engagement at the decision-making table and equity — are absent in the lives of millions of our children and families.
With this understanding, we have an extraordinary opportunity to get it right.
Our Mission
We aim to inspire, support and sustain a movement of communities that can address the root causes of childhood trauma, foster equity and build community resilience.
The Center for Community Resilience provides technical assistance, facilitation, analysis and policy guidance to help institutions, organizations and collaboratives create measurable, lasting change. Our work is a solutions-based approach to preventing and mitigating Adverse Childhood Experiences in the context of Adverse Community Environments, what we call the Pair of ACEs. Teams across the country use the Building Community Resilience process and tools to help their communities not only ‘bounce back’ in the face of adversity, but bounce forward to improve outcomes for children and families.
Trauma, Equity and Resilience
Adverse community environments are the result of policies and practices across multiple systems that were perfectly designed for the place-based inequities they produce. Many of the nation’s poor live in communities of concentrated poverty not by choice, but rather by design – the cumulative result of social and criminal policies enacted over the course of our nation’s history.
Over the last five years, CCR partners across the country have been working together to build community resilience by addressing and mitigating the Pair of ACEs, emphasizing the importance of centering equity at the heart of what it means to be resilient.
The Pair of ACEs Tree
The Pair of ACEs tree illustrates the relationship between adverse childhood experiences, experienced at the individual level within a family, and adverse community environments. The Pair of ACEs tree communicates – in simple terms – the issues we aim to address. By doing so, we are able to engage diverse stakeholders in developing policy goals that support efforts to address adversity rooted in systems and communities. By asking the question “What’s in your soil?,” communities can begin to set goals and implement policy and practice change that builds community resilience.
Get In Touch
If you're interested in collaborating with the Center for Community Resilience, use this form to send us an email.
Recent Articles
Dr. Wendy Ellis, Director of the Center for Community Resilience and GWSPH faculty member, was recently appointed to two advisory committees.
The Biden-Harris Administration and the 117th Congress are confronting an unprecedented set of interlocking crises not seen in generations.