WELCOME!

Peace4Crawford is a trauma-informed initiative, based in the Crawford County System of Care (SOC) Partnership, promoting social change in Crawford County, heading toward a trauma-informed community.

The SOC is a framework involving collaboration across the community for the purpose of creating a seamless, integrated, and coordinated system of supports for children, youth, and families that is family and youth-driven, strength-based, and trauma-informed. The SOC helps children, youth, and families function better at home, in school, in the community, and throughout life. It is comprised of professional agencies involved in the health and well-being of the community, family partners, and youth partners.

What is an Adverse Childhood Experience? An adverse childhood experience (ACE) describes a traumatic experience in a person’s life occurring before the age of 18 that the person remembers as an adult. These traumatic experiences negatively impact health and behavior.

What We Do

Peace4Crawford advocates developing resources and programs to prevent, identify, and treat ACEs in Crawford County. We envision a healthy and resilient community. A community where everyone is valued, respected, safely cared for, and treated compassionately.

We believe that multiple systems intersect with our focus on change. ACEs are at the heart of the most challenging issues facing our community. We focus on the men, women, and children who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, including organizations, businesses, and systems in Crawford County that interact with survivors of ACEs (Note: Everyone is impacted including those that provide the service).

Our Strategies to Influence Social Change

• Provide equal access to trauma-informed treatment.
• Improve quality of life.
• Create lasting partnerships.
• Provide access to safe, affordable housing.
• Improve school performance.

Our Core Values

• Collaborative: We focus on supporting community members in receiving the best combination of services by working across systems of care.
• Integrative: We believe in addressing the root causes of individual and family needs and problems.
• Preventative: We believe in proactive measures (i.e. early intervention, treatment, building resiliency, increasing community protective factors, education, training, and awareness) that reduce or eliminate causative factors of childhood trauma.
• Generative: We marshal community resources to generate healthy communities by co-creating solutions for multi-dimensional family and community challenges.

STATEMENT OF SUPPORT FOR A SAFE, HEALTHY AND SECURE COMMUNITY FOR ALL

We live in a caring and compassionate community and we are all deeply saddened and angered by the ongoing racism, violence, intolerance, and discrimination against marginalized groups, particularly Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color (BIPOC).

The U.S. Office of Disease Prevention has recognized that discrimination has a negative impact on health. We recognize that racial injustices are perpetuated in all aspects of public and private life including education, health, employment, housing, and politics. This has contributed to poorer health outcomes for BIPOC, including higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and infant mortality.

We recognize that racism is a public health crisis and we pledge to address its root causes. These include generational disparities in education; access to jobs, earning power; access to safe and affordable housing; and access to health care and other family support services.  We welcome and support these much-needed discussions in our community. We stand together with all those who are speaking out against racism across our society.

We pledge to stand with members of our local NAACP to establish a productive dialogue to identify and address racial discrimination in our organizations and businesses, from hiring and accessibility to programming, training, supervision, and other organizational and institutional policies, practices and processes.

We will strive to establish inclusive working groups within our organization and community to explore racial disparities, to work to eliminate racism, and for racial equity and justice. We aim to work consciously as a community to confront the realities of our past and present, to promote healing, and to lift up the diverse voices of our community.

Together we pledge to share the burden of fighting against systemic racism and inequality; to leverage our privileges and platforms to speak out against violence and injustice; and to confront racism in ourselves and in the systems of our community and country.

We are committed to building safe, healthy and resilient communities.