All week area students have been attending Gogh to Camp, an arts and creativity camp presented by the Children’s Center of Northwest North Carolina in conjunction with the Surry County Office of Substance Abuse Recovery and other local partners.
Its name is a clever take on the famous one-eared painter Vincent van Gogh — there have been no reports of any severed ears this week.
Charlotte Reeves, outreach coordinator for the Surry County Office of Substance Abuse Recovery, said the idea is to create meaningful and positive experiences for young people. On Wednesday, the kids dropped by the Reeves Summer Camp to paint kindness rocks they then hid at the Children’s Center Thursday in between making tie-dyed shirts.
She explained, “Not so long ago a small group of individuals banded together with an idea: imagine a Surry County where adverse childhood experiences were not only eliminated, but also where there where childhood experiences that made life worth growing up for.”
Reeves said she has seen the evolution of both the needs of the suffering as well as the attitudes and priorities of community members through firsthand observation during her tenure at the agency.
Since its inception as the Opioid Response Team in 2017 to today, Surry County Office of Substance Abuse Recovery has aided in the realization that drugs and substance abuse were hardly the only core problem in Surry County — although it was the one getting the most attention and headlines for many years.
She and her colleagues came to understand that substance abuse, overdoses, and “all of the similarly correlated items were merely symptoms of something much deeper.”
They set out to find solutions and Surry County was chosen in 2021 to be one of the pilot counties for Strengthening Systems for North Carolina Children in conjunction with UNC Chapel Hill and Injury-Free NC. Reeves and two dozen members of the community from different sectors such as law enforcement, education, and local government came together and through collaborative discussions over months “unveiled local evidence that supported that substance use, among many other health and social problems, came from ACEs: Adverse Childhood Experiences.”
The group discussed the causal effects that lead to recurring patterns of behavior, but their work had only just begun. The statewide leaders again selected Surry County and Reeves to assemble another second core team for the Collaborative Learning Institute.
She called upon her network of local organizations and got the collaborative support and dedication of four other agencies: Surry/Stokes Friends of Youth, Vincent’s Legacy, and the Surry County Health & Nutrition Center. She said through a lengthy process of brainstorming, prioritizing, and strategic processing, they identified the need to address social isolation and non-violent social problem solving skills.
Both social isolation and a lack of non-violent problem solving skills were among shared risk factors found by the group. They asked what could be done about those identified risk factors given limited resources and felt as though they had hit on a novel idea. She said, “Instead of fighting the bad in the world, what if we worked to make sure there was something positive?”
That idea gave birth to a new group called PaCEs, a play on the term ACEs, for positive childhood experiences. The logo has a line through the letter A, which previously stood for adverse, because the group is not focused on the negative but creating the positive.
“PaCEs is not designed to be a resource intensive duty nor full-time commitment. Hence, the scope of the initiative is rather narrow, which was the goal of the CLI process,” she explained. The aim is to make sure that children have some kind of positive experience available to them in the community where they live.
Reeves said the bulk of the work will be addressed through contributions of individuals and businesses which is in line with the PaCEs mission, “Direct community changes by assuring the presence of positive childhood experiences.”
“From the culture that we cultivate across our neighborhoods and communities to the family and friends that children have to call on for support, the vision is a Surry County that can nourish the healthy development of children through enlightening, fulfilling, and healthy outlets,” she said.
As is the custom with programming facilitate through the office of substance abuse recovery, it is driven by data and data analysis. “Two concepts were developed very early on in the planning process: we need a way to quantify our impact, and we want to target the areas that need it the most,” she said.
The officials created a manner to track participation in events they hold and ensure equitable distribution of opportunity across the county using elementary school districts as a built in defined border.
PaCEs are looking for a way to light the beacon of opportunity, but they do not want to be keepers of that light. Rather, if all goes to plan, it is their preference that local communities connect and “take ownership of the creation of healthy communities and environments.”
This week Reeves said PaCEs got off to a good start thanks to the help of community groups and individuals, “We had a lot of community donations to get all the supplies and food for the kids, it was great.”
Reeves said having partners like Robin Testerman and Ashley Camacho at the Children’s Center are just the sort of allies PaCEs needs to long term success, “They are the model to look up to in this work with youth.”
“It’s been a community coming together to present an opportunity for kids to have a positive experience by being with others, doing art, and experiencing joy.”
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