In April 2023, the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute's (FPG) FRONTIER program sponsored a statewide summit, “Leveraging North Carolina’s Assets to Prevent Child Trauma." The 380 in-person and virtual attendees included representatives from academia, community and state organizations, lived experience, philanthropy, government agencies, and governing bodies. FPG's Diana “Denni” Fishbein, PhD, and Melissa Clepper-Faith, MD, MPH, a translational research program and policy coordinator at FPG, organized this two-day event.

The overarching goal of the summit was to identify common threads across constituent groups in North Carolina, each working to address child trauma, and determine how, together, we can co-create a statewide effort in community and policy spaces to tackle its sources and reduce its incidence.

“I wanted to bring everybody together to co-create a statewide movement with constituent groups rallying around the same cause, " said Denni Fishbein.

Child trauma has myriad effects and solutions. Not every important idea could be shared at a two-day summit or in its executive summary, but certain themes arose repeatedly around several key topics. A series of articles were produced to explore those themes in greater detail, and they can be found on the "Leveraging North Carolina's Assets to Prevent Child Trauma" landing page.