With little funding and lots of effort, communities find ways to combat childhood trauma

One day, from her post at a police department, community network coordinator Teri Barila overheard an officer comment about a frequent caller: A woman had just telephoned police for what seemed like her 200th neighborhood complaint.

The passing comment resonated with Barila, who was tasked with reducing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in Walla Walla County, located in the southeast part of Washington state. It made her think of a book called “Neighbor Power” by Jim Diers, which chronicles community development strategies in Seattle.

“He talked about using that negative energy — or what police might consider negative — as a call for action,” she said. “How do we convert repeat calls to the police department to action?”

In the years that followed, Barila helped organize the local residents into a powerful neighborhood group that, among other efforts, transformed their local park and improved their children’s environment in the process. In a recent report, Mathematica Policy Research evaluated five rural communities in Washington state and found that efforts such as the one in Walla Walla County decreased the social, emotional, and physical problems related to childhood trauma. 

Research has shown that exposure to a large number of ACEs — such as witnessing domestic violence or experiencing physical abuse — can trigger a stress response that can harm a child’s developing brain. That stress and trauma disrupts neurodevelopment, hijacks the body’s stress response system, and weakens the immune system, increasing the risk of social, emotional, and health problems in later life, from suicide and substance abuse to diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

“With limited resources, these communities were able to significantly improve their outcomes,” said Natalya Verbitsky-Savitz, senior research statistician at Mathematica and principal investigator on the study. “I don’t think there’s a magic bullet answer to the problem of ACEs, but we found that communities could do something about them.”

Stemming childhood adversity at the neighborhood level

Washington state’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Public-Private Initiative (APPI) commissioned Mathematica to do a retrospective study to gauge the effectiveness of these efforts. (The New York Times’ David Bornstein gives more background on these networks, which were formed to stem societal problems such as youth violence, underage drinking, teen pregnancy, and child abuse and neglect from 1990 to 2006.) Mathematica and its partners analyzed existing data, conducted site visits, interviewed stakeholders, and designed a survey to evaluate community efforts to prevent and mitigate ACEs and how successful they were in lowering their incidence.

The positive findings from Mathematica’s three-year study are particularly interesting because the Washington projects represent some of the earliest efforts nationwide to address childhood adversity. Some of the communities studied were targeting the issues even before the original ACE study put a name to the experience.

Of the 11 projects they evaluated within those communities, Mathematica found positive outcomes in six. For the other communities, they didn’t have enough data to rigorously evaluate them, or couldn’t definitively credit the project with the desired outcome.

While the available data doesn’t directly tie the community efforts to fewer ACEs, researchers were able to show that building better community support systems improved the well-being of residents. Projects demonstrated reductions in underage drinking, alcohol and cigarette use among pregnant women and a lower incidence of low-birth weight babies, among others effects. (To directly connect the community projects and ACEs, researchers would need to identify comparable communities where similar changes did not occur and then compare their levels of childhood adversity over time.)

Even if the latest study couldn’t “dig into that level,” network coordinators like Barila said research has shown community-building work can buffer the negative impact of ACEs. The projects gave adults in those communities better support systems and youth felt more connected to their neighbors. By lessening social isolation, such efforts can boost residents’ resilience and offer coping strategies to address life’s challenges, which “should help interrupt intergenerational transmission of ACEs,” Barila said.

Mathematica’s positive findings in six areas are also noteworthy because the communities had such little funding to enact change, with three operating on a budget of less than $100,000 a year. Often, funding sources were temporary and leaders had to constantly seek new sources. Communities used existing resources to help fill funding gaps.

“Obviously money helps, but you don’t need to wait until you get several million before you attempt to work on these issues,” Verbitsky-Savitz said. “Going forward, their challenge will be to find resources to continue to improve the well-being of children and adults in their communities.”

Helping communities transform themselves

About a decade ago, as Barila sat in the local police department, she decided to test the concept she had studied. Was there a way to harness that resident’s energy into improving her neighborhood in Walla Walla’s Jefferson Park?

Barila drove over and knocked on the door of the resident who had called the police so many times. The mother of two young kids explained she was worried about graffiti and drug use, especially in the park.

Years ago, moms in Jefferson Park said goodbye to their children on summer mornings and let them run free in the local park. But over the years, the area had slowly deteriorated. Graffiti was rampant, drug dealers loitered, and transients called the park home. Families no longer took their children to play there.

Together, Barila and the worried mom planned a pot luck to gather neighbors, address concerns and come up with a plan to reclaim the park. With help from a local foundation, they raised money for playground equipment so kids would have a reason to be in the park. The city cut back low, overhanging branches that seemed to invite drug deals. More potlucks and picnics followed. New exercise stations gave nearby seniors a reason to get involved, too. 

The energy was contagious. Residents started sprucing up their homes and started a Christmas tree lighting in the park. The chief of police worked on a new stop sign.

“Families had taken back the park,” Barila said. “You’re not going to have vandalism when 50 kids and their parents are playing on the equipment and visiting.”

Later, Barila used that same strategy of local empowerment in neighborhoods such as the Edith-Carrie neighborhood, an area with less than 100 homes that flank a state penitentiary. She asked residents: What do you need to improve your neighborhood?

Unlike Jefferson Park, there was no central park to improve. Instead, the most salient concerns were the feral rabbits overrunning the area and the lack of lighting.

“That’s the whole point of the story,” Barila explained. “I was ready to go in and build another playground and they wanted us to help with the feral rabbits.”

The rabbits had been destroying gardens and yards throughout the neighborhood. Residents got to work trapping and relocating them, eventually restoring the ecological balance. They put up lighting on porches and in alleys and partnered with a power company to help defray installation costs.

Once the most pressing problems were rectified, the residents talked about how they had no common space to be together as neighbors. Over the years, they worked together with a community foundation to purchase property which they converted into a park and, later, low-income housing. A community center was finally completed this past year.

Barila was instrumental in helping the community realize its goals.   

“There needs to be central voice, a cheerleader, the glue, that keeps the community in front of the community because it’s too easy to let it not be your priority,” she said. “The trick is: How do you empower neighbors where they don’t become dependent on you? How do you build so that you can then move on to another neighborhood? That’s the age old question in this type of work, finding that blend.”

She emphasized the benefits of shared leadership, so that a movement isn’t “locked into one person’s agenda.”

In one neighborhood, a small victory came when the chief of police showed up to a pancake breakfast meeting.

“He showed up really early on and he was flipping and serving the pancakes,” she said. “You could see people’s jaws drop: ‘He’s here on a Saturday, flipping pancakes for us?’ In that neighborhood, it was a big moment.”

While the latest Mathematica study is gratifying, Barila pointed out that budget cuts are always quick to hit programs that focus on prevention – even when they are proven to work.

“It’s easier to stay trapped and sick in the status quo, and think it’s someone else, it’s those neighborhoods, it’s those zip codes,” she said. “But it’s all of us. Why is it so hard to do what we know we should be doing?”

[Photo by North Charleston via Flickr.]