What is Resilient Coastal Georgia?

Individuals and organizations in Chatham County and the surrounding Coastal Region are working together with Resilient Georgia, a statewide collaborative, to build trauma resilient communities that can prevent and heal childhood adversity.

What does that mean?

From school leaders, faith leaders, and community agencies, we have learned that there are many children and families in our area:

• Who have experienced trauma* which has not been addressed;
• Whose behavior and decision making are continually influenced by their trauma;
• Who do not realize what they are experiencing is trauma and;
• That live in a community which does not have the adequate knowledge and skill set to respond in a trauma-informed and trauma-responsive manner.

The Resilient Georgia collaborative has supported the local effort by funding selected key strategies over the past two years to develop trauma-informed responses to children and young adults (ages 0-26) undergoing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) or experiencing trauma from them. This work, coordinated through and by the Coastal Georgia Indicators Coalition, is being expanded now to include more diverse participant organizations and a larger geographic region.

Using a collective impact methodology, participating organizations will learn more about the experiences of childhood trauma, identify and test strategies that will help children and young adults who experience trauma, and improve the systems that children rely on for their well­ being.

In the coming months, the initiative will focus in five key areas, answering the question of:

How might we

• develop and implement a school-based collaborative trauma-responsive team?
• build trauma-sensitive capacity in organizations that se e children outside of school?
• help our judicial and first responder systems be trauma-informed?
• assist the region in systems change and capacity building to support resiliency in children experiencing trauma?
• ensure that our behavioral health network in our community is robust and consistent in its response to children and young adults experiencing trauma?