The Idaho Children’s Trust Fund was founded in 1985 by the state legislature to combat child abuse before it happens and ensure that children are safely guided and protected from threats to their innocence. This month, the organization celebrates Strengthening Families Month, where the fund organizes events to help families and provide resources to prevent child abuse.
“We're doing a Stewards of Children training. So that's another one of our trainings that we provide that talks about child sexual abuse. And it talks about how to prevent that and what we can do as adults to help ourselves, but also to not be in those situations, but also to help protect kids in every situation that they're in and really know what to look for when a child is being abused so that's another one of our trainings that we do,” said Kylee Mizen, the community resource coordinator for the Trust Fund.
Mizen says the point of these events is to help the public by transforming from a trauma-informed society to a hope-informed society. It’s to help recognize adverse childhood experiences or A.C.E.s as they are known and how P.C.E.s or positive childhood experiences can help either mitigate or help prevent these A.C.E.s from preventing that child to fully embrace their potential.
“It always comes back to positive childhood experiences. We're trying to build as many as we possibly can as adults around kids,” Mizen said. “And that's what everybody should be doing is everybody wants a child to have a positive life, but they're going to have trauma. Every child has their own thing that they've experienced that was really hard for them, whether that's puberty in middle school or whatever, but that they have that opportunity to have as many positive childhood experiences as they can.”
For more information, visit Idaho Children's Trust Fund.