Guest blog by Annabelle Pike
The Hardin County Youth Prevention Task Force is a group led by the Lincoln Trail District Health Department with key support from Baptist Health Hardin. Key partners include Hardin County Schools and other community partners, including the court system, corrections, businesses, and others interested in building a great future for our community’s youth.
The Task Force’s current focus areas include mental health, suicide prevention, and substance use prevention and intervention. We work to align initiatives related to this work and collaborate for the best use of everyone’s expertise and resources.
In our exploration to provide education to our members, we came across the Bounce Coalition and found that the training opportunities would be ideal for advancing our work. The education around adverse childhood experience (ACES) and resiliency helped us understand that, while we may not be able to impact all of the ACEs, we can certainly be part of providing protective factors to the community’s youth.
The training ensured we are all working from the same knowledge. Given the diversity of people on our task force and others involved in community work, each person is coming to the table with a different level of understanding of ACEs and impact on health. Bounce 101 gave us the same language to use. When reflecting at the conclusion of Bounce 102, attendees appreciated the hands-on tools that we can all use in our work and in our own lives. The activities in both trainings provided a great opportunity for us to connect with each other.
We especially appreciated the opportunity to extend this training opportunity to our governmental and community partners not on the task force but interested in this very important training.
