The Maine Story

Network Urges Everyone to “Join the Conversation” about Resilience (1997 – 2013)

Read the latest Maine update here (2014 – 2015)

“[Our goals are] to get funding so we can really move things forward and bring more people on…so we can change how we think about trauma in our state.”
—Leslie Forstadt, co-facilitator of the Maine Resilience Building Network

Sue Mackey Andrews will talk to anyone about ACEs: Pediatricians. Early childcare workers. Parent advocacy groups. And those on the front lines who work with kids, like the longtime school bus driver from rural Maine, a gruff and taciturn man who insisted, during a half-day school district inservice, that trauma and resilience had nothing to do with his work.

The driver also told Andrews that he would not start the bus each day until he had made eye contact with every single child and greeted him or her by name. And that, Andrews responded, was exactly the relevance of his work to build resilience.

The tagline of the Maine Resilience Building Network (MRBN), which Andrews co-facilitates, is “Join the Conversation.” The group, formed in the spring of 2012, brings together practitioners in medical care, education and behavioral health, along with those working in business, law enforcement, the military, juvenile justice and faith communities.

Since its early meetings, where a half-dozen people, all of them doing ACE-related work, brainstormed a name for their new network, MRBN has grown to include 77 members, with reach into all of Maine’s sixteen counties.

From the beginning, said Andrews and MRBN co-facilitator Leslie Forstadt, associate professor with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, the group agreed that the message should focus on wellness and healing rather than illness and trauma.

The word “resilience” had to be part of the name because, said Andrews, “We talk about how it’s never too late to realize your ACEs and, through support and personal discovery, overcome them.” The term “building” captured the sense of a growing effort, and “network” aptly described how individual sites would function autonomously while sharing their innovations, challenges and questions.

MRBN began small, growing mostly by word-of-mouth and remaining committed to a model of “collective impact”—the understanding that no single agency or program can solve a complex social problem, but each can work to advance a shared mission. The collective impact model calls for a “backbone organization” that does the work of convening and communicating among members; together, Andrews and Forstadt are the spine of MRBN.

This is MRBN’s mission: “To promote resilience in all people by increasing and improving our understanding of traumas and stressors such as ACEs and why they matter.” And while the network has grown to include geriatricians and experts in adolescent medicine, its focus is primarily on children, pre-natal to age five, and their families—which, today, includes teen parents and grandparents who are raising children. “That’s where we felt we could have the biggest impact,” Andrews said.

Even before MRBN, Maine was primed to think about trauma and resilience. The state is New England’s poorest, with one in four children being raised in poverty (the national average is 1 in 5). In the rural “rim” counties, the child poverty rate is a sobering one in three. Unemployment is higher than in nearby Vermont and New Hampshire; many children lack school readiness, and the incidence of domestic violence is on the rise.

Prior to the 1998 publication of the Centers for Disease Control Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study co-authored by Robert Anda and Vincent Felitti, Maine had received several federal grants for trauma-related work with children and adults, including one called the “We Remember” project, given to the Passamaquoddy Tribe to create a community-based, culturally competent system of care for children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. By the time Felitti first visited the state, in 2005, his work brought confirming data to what many practitioners had been witnessing for years.

Andrews remembers that “aha” moment. “When I first heard Dr. Felitti talk, I remember thinking not only how it applied to my professional work but also to my family of origin.” That happens often, she said, in educational sessions about ACEs, which encourage participants to reflect on their own experience as a way of understanding the research about early adversity and its impact on health and behavior.

But a single “aha” is not enough to change minds—let alone practice and policy—across a state of 1.3 million people. Since 2005, Felitti and other nationally known experts on trauma and resilience, including Jack Shonkoff of the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, have visited Maine numerous times. Felitti has spoken to the Child Abuse Action Network and the Maine Academy of Pediatrics; he has talked with juvenile justice officials, social workers and psychiatrists. He was interviewed on Maine Things Considered, a public radio program.

These visits brought the research on ACEs to a variety of Maine audiences. Adversity and resilience became more familiar concepts to practitioners, who learned through multiple exposures to the information and opportunities to ask questions.

Initially, Maine’s work on adversity and resilience gained support at the highest levels of state government. By 2005, the governor’s Children’s Cabinet had declared addressing ACEs in policy and practice to be one of its top 3 priorities. The Maine Children’s Growth Council, formed by statute in 2007, reflects an understanding of ACEs in its mission to develop and maintain “sustainable social and financial investment in healthy development of [Maine’s] young children and their families.”

Even so, knowledge about ACEs was slow to spread. In 2011, the Health Accountability Team of the Maine Children’s Growth Council conducted a statewide survey to learn whether practitioners knew about the ACE research and if they were applying it in their work. They surveyed health care providers, early care and education providers, legislators, mental health professionals, law enforcement officials and members of the business community.

The Maine ACEs Study, published in December 2011, found that fewer than 1/2 the respondents knew about Anda’s and Felitti’s original ACE Study, though nearly all thought it was “important” or “very important” to understand how early trauma shaped adult outcomes.
The state study also drove the national data home. Applying the CDC’s ACE Study ratios to Maine children in foster care, the Maine study estimated that—if those children received no intervention and their adverse experiences continued to bother them—20 of every 1,000 children would become obese; 40 would attempt suicide, 70 would engage in illicit drug use, 80 would have unintended pregnancies and more than 100 would suffer depression.

What’s more, Maine put a price tag on that suffering. A “return on investment” study showed that the state spent over $3.5 billion annually on outcomes relevant to ACEs, including the treatment of obesity, diabetes, cancer, depression, substance abuse and sexually transmitted infections.

Once the Maine ACE Survey was finished, the Health Accountability Team gathered the study’s authors along with practitioners from about half a dozen sites statewide who were doing work related to ACEs. They held a day-long retreat, and from that, MRBN was born.

“We wanted to harness the great work that was already happening around the state to get people on the same page and help them feel they were part of something bigger,” said Forstadt, MRBN’s co-facilitator.

MRBN meetings now happen about five times a year, with extensive electronic communication, subcommittee meetings, information sharing and site visits in-between. The collective impact framework shapes the network’s philosophy and practice. Early on, the group received $47,000 from the Bingham Foundation, a local philanthropic group; the original intent was to use some of those funds to give $1000 to each of 20 sites, a way of “seeding local resources,” Andrews said.

But after some time and discussion, the group decided instead to fund collective projects such as ACEs Summits—educational events held around the state—and a family resilience support curriculum, currently in the pilot stage.

The ACE Summits have proven to be an effective vehicle for spreading information and catalyzing action. Because a presentation that focuses only on adversity can be “a little heavy,” Forstadt said, “and leave folks without tools for what to do,” the ACE Summits combine a session on “ACEs 101” with a longer focus on resilience and intervention.

“For every 35 people you present to, there will be at least one or two who are really jazzed,” Forstadt said; the Summits aim to give those people strategies, skills and concrete ways to get involved. MRBN has conducted seven ACE Summits, with 14 scheduled for 2014; Andrews has fielded requests from school districts, tribal groups and county governments.

Meantime, MRBN has helped to support local innovation around ACEs, such as the “resilience bookmark,” a glossy card with a succinct definition of resilience, developed by the G.E.A.R. Parent Network, a parent support and educational network that is also a member of MRBN. Two school systems want to pilot an ACE screening as part of their in-home visits to all pre-kindergarten children, and a dozen pediatric or family practices statewide are interested in incorporating an ACE screening.

And the conversations continue. Andrews and Forstadt are working to build a speakers’ bureau to provide consistent trainings that can be offered statewide; the MRBN website directs users to news and resources about ACEs. Forstadt wrote an op-ed about ACEs for the Bangor Daily News, Maine’s second largest newspaper.

“ACEs don’t belong to any one group or discipline in our state,” Andrews said. “When we do a session or a meeting at the local level, it’s done on an inter-agency, inter-disciplinary basis.”

While that diversity is a strength, it also requires faith in the collective impact framework and respect for the different ways that various organizations approach the work. “Collective impact honors diversity of thought, what people bring to the table, and it acknowledges that this kind of work takes time,” Andrews said.

As MRBN grows, one challenge is to ensure that new members understand and are faithful to the network’s mission, which includes responsible and sensitive use of any ACE screenings. Recently, an organization interested in MRBN membership said it planned to use the ACE survey for data collection only, not to foster conversations or interventions with clients.

That violated MRBN’s commitment to avoid inflicting further trauma; Andrews talked with the group’s membership and decided that organization was not suitable for MRBN. “Now I do an orientation to MRBN at every other meeting and go over what we expect.”

Data collection has also been a challenge. While Andrews and Forstadt receive evaluations from every ACE Summit, they lack a way to track sites’ innovations and outcomes. “We had a very static data collection tool that I wanted everybody to use, and it just didn’t work,” Andrews said. “Now I’m sending notes: what’s the one thing that’s happened in the last 30 days with your ACEs work that you really want to share or celebrate?”

Andrews continues to seek funding for MRBN: enough to keep the website current, host more ACE Summits, train speakers and support the family resilience curriculum. She’d like to replicate the CDC’s ACE Study in Maine, to obtain a clear sense of how ACEs impact children and adults statewide. She is paid to work five hours a week for MRBN, but puts in at least 20 more as a volunteer. Forstadt, on faculty with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, is not paid by MRBN for her time, though she was contracted to conduct the Maine ACE Survey.

At just 18 months post-inception, “MRBN is not even a toddler,” said Forstadt. “We have yet to see where this is going to go, and it’s exciting to have this identity: a logo, a website, a presence and an impact statewide.

“[Our goals are] to get funding so we can really move things forward and bring more people on…so we can change how we think about trauma in our state.” Andrews agrees. “I do think this is the most potentially high-impact research on health, education and prosperity that we have in front of us right now. It has relevance in every corner of the work that gets done in our state, and the cost savings in that could be realized in health care and public safety are huge. Equal to that are the human savings that could be realized if we just supported people in a better way.”