Description
Section 1: Community Action Toolbox
This innovative Toolbox is a step by step guide on how the Children’s Resilience Initiative™ was envisioned, created, crafted, and catalyzed our community into action. With humor and the voice of a storyteller, Teri and Mark capture the energy and passion of their work to move the implications of the ACE study, brain development, and resilience into a real-life community.
Chapter titles include:
- Getting Started– It begins with a fish tale, of sorts! Learn how Teri’s experience with Rob Anda and fish stress opened the door to the Children’s Resilience Initiative idea.
- Plow the Field First describes the upfront work that went into the planning and thinking.
- Once is Not Enough discusses the layers involved in this work.
- In the chapter Mid Course Adjustments you’ll learn about aha’s and slippery slopes.
- Taking it on the Road presents idea about media, humor, and baseline work.
- Building the Framework describes just that!
- Integration highlights circles and systems and rallying troops.
- New Targets: Moving Upstream is not about fishing, but about parents.
- Vital Learnings talks in part about the healing and hope this work has brought to so many.
- The Nuts & Bolts helps with administrative type questions.
- The “End” Game wraps up the Toolbox with thoughts on, “when are you done?”
The Toolbox is loaded with suggestions and strategies to consider as you think through your own action plan, including sections to start your own plan.
Section 2: Building a Work Plan
Building a Work Plan provides an extensive collection of sample documents helpful in implementing you OWN community planning. While based on the Walla Walla experience, the documents are templates for you to craft the unique fit for your community. The 57 pages of materials cover five major areas: Creating the Core Team, Building the Team and Foundational Documents, Developing Community Capacity, Materials and Marketing, and Getting the Word Out. We try to answer the questions you will have on topics such as action planning, logic models, surveys and evaluations, presentation ideas and how to market your own initiative.
Our story is ultimately about how we have built community capacity around an issue that matters to us—our children. By bringing awareness of ACEs, brain development and resilience strategies forward, we can each understand the power of nurturance in helping to buffer the impact of ACES and to move toward a reduction in ACEs. As we say in our tagline:Empowering community understanding of the forces that shape us and our children.
Consider taking Course 4, Building Your Community Initiative, with Teri Barila to put the Community Action Manual into practice! Check out our training page.
