Answer the Call to Help Shelby County Children

All summer, the Adverse Childhood Experience Center Task Force of Shelby County has been asking randomly selected Shelby County residents to “Answer the Call” by participating in a confidential phone survey that will gather information to help develop tools to assist parents in protecting their children’s emotional and behavioral health.

Those tools will be housed in two state-of-the-art parenting sites – one at Baptist Women’s Hospital – that will open in January 2015. The sites will offer Shelby County families access to professional guidance to identify and address symptoms of toxic stress.

The ACE Center Task Force of Shelby County recently was established to create a “trauma-informed” community, helping residents understand the costly and harmful outcomes of toxic stress on all families that arises from adverse childhood experiences.

“The ACE Survey results will show the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences in our county and their impact on poor health outcomes,” said Gwen Price, Parenting Initiative Director at Porter-Leath, which will administer the two parenting sites. “This information will be used as a baseline as we strive to help our community become trauma-informed.”

The ACE Survey will end on Aug. 31.