Improving children’s lives by building resilient communities

Our fifth annual 2018 Symposium on Children held on Oct. 4th was a daylong event filled with commitment and passion with a goal of bringing together experts from the research and policy worlds as well as practitioners. We heard from speakers, panelists, and community leaders about the impact of stress and trauma on children, the growing opioid crisis in Ohio, and ideas for building resilience and identifying community solutions  statewide, nationally, and globally. Understanding what factors build resilience is key in reducing trauma’s impact on children’s development. It is our hope these continued conversations help all of us—as researchers, practitioners, and policymakers—to translate research into sound practice and policy change, and to learn from one another.

Learn more from our speaker presentations:

Dr. Howard Pinderhughes, Professor and Chair of Social & Behavior Sciences, University of California, San Francisco; Research Associate, Institute for the Study of Social Change at U.C. Berkeley: It’s like a jungle, sometimes it makes me wonder: Healing communities & restoring community resiliency

Mr. Benjamin Perks, UN Representative & Senior Fellow, University of Birmingham, UK: The influence of violence and adverse childhood experiences on long-term prosperity, security and development