ACE Project – In 2020, Holy Ground PBC, in partnership with another local nonprofit, was awarded a major grant by the Quantum Foundation to develop a Palm Beach County-wide pilot program to address the health and social effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
In this first year of project development, Holy Ground has been conducting training sessions for board, staff, mentors and clients, and performing ACE-based client assessments and pediatric testing. The results of the assessments direct the trauma-informed counseling that our clients – all of whom suffered multiple ACEs as children – now receive.
In the second year, we will analyze the data we have been gathering and use it to fine-tune the implementation plan.
The goals of the ACE program, once it is fully implemented, include:
- Increasing awareness of the startling prevalence of traumatic childhood experiences and the critical need to actively address their long-term effects, which more often than not impact children into adulthood and throughout their lives
- Facilitating healing in those who have suffered ACEs
- Educating the community on how to interact more effectively with ACE-impacted adults
- Learning how to prevent traumatic incidents in future generations. Generational change is a key goal of Holy Ground’s program.
The ACE training had a profound effect on many in our organization and deepened our understanding of our clients’ psychological needs. To learn more about ACEs, see the Center for Child Counseling (https://www.centerforchildcounseling.org/programs/fightingaces/), which has developed a high-level vision for addressing ACE impacts, which our ACE implementation supports, or the Harvard Center on the Developing Child (https://developingchild.harvard.edu/media-coverage/how-adverse-childhood-experiences-aces-impact-adult-anger/), which produced the brief video you see on our home page (https://holygroundpbc.org/).
Faith in Action – Faith in Action PBC (FIAPBC) is a separate organization that grew out of Holy Ground’s desire to address the critical shortage of local affordable housing for families like those in our program. FIAPBC consists of a group of community leaders and organizations empowering the interfaith community to join the effort for safe and affordable housing in Palm Beach County. For more information, go to https://www.facebook.com/faithinactionpbc.