NOTE from Carey on 8.12.26 : The PACEs Connection social network was replaced by a splash page on August 10, 2026. Knowing this was happening, I urged leadership to let the most prolific content providers and donors know, and started saving blogs I’d written over my 13-years of knowing Jane Stevens, founder and publisher of PACEs Connection and the now disappeared ACESTooHigh.com. This history, written by Jane, is saved on my site now for posterity. Someday the history of how this movement came about, who led it, who funded it, how it grew, expanded, contracted, and more, will be told. Saving this and other information on my careysipp.com site is an attempt to capture as much of this information as possible. It’s here for use while the PACEs Connection site is revitalized, and here in case some of this information doesn’t make it to the new site. AGAIN, this is a limited selection of article I deemed most important, and is in no way a comprehensive or fair representation of the wide scope of PACEs Connection in its heyday, when we had about 20 staffers and were offering frequent “A Better Normal”, “Historical Trauma in America” (by region), “Connecting Communities One Book at a Time”, and other webinars and events. For more of the history, another separate site, https://www.pacesconnectioninfo.com/ is still up. I will try to add more content from it, hoping that if it is saved in several places, it will be available for the revitalized site and/or posterity.
Jane Stevens launched PACEs Connection in January 2012 with ACEsConnection.com, now PACEsConnection.com, a community-of-practice social network and ACEsTooHigh.com, a news site for the general public. The intent was to inform people, organizations, and communities about a new understanding of human behavior that had been emerging since 1980s. It was clear that this new knowledge had the potential to solve our most intractable problems. The network was designed to connect the pioneers who were integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on PACEs science across sectors. This included pediatricians, educators, business owners, judges, community activists, people participating in associations, people working in juvenile justice, social workers, people in the faith-based community, emergency medical technicians, etc.
In 2014, PACEs Connection received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The California Endowment and began operating as a nonprofit through a fiscal sponsorship with Prevention Institute. At that time, a small team of people began working with Stevens to grow PACEs Connection. In March 2016, PACEs Connection received another round of funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which sunsets in 2021, and TSNE MissionWorks, which is a 501c3, became our fiscal sponsor. Subsequently, at the end of 2016, PACEs Connection received a second round of funding from The California Endowment. In 2017, the Lisa & John Pritzker Family Fund, and The George Sarlo Foundation provided two years of funding. Genentech’s Resilience Effect philanthropic initiative began providing funding, which mostly supports a reporter who covers pediatrics. In 2020, Blue Shield of California Foundation began providing funding for work in California.
PACEs Connection has become the hub for the PACEs movement. Between 2012-2021, PACEsConnection.com grew from 200 members and no community sites, to more than 52,000 people from every state in the U.S. and more than 40 countries, with more members joining daily. More than 400 communities representing PACEs initiatives have launched in nearly every state in the U.S. and in several countries, with more community sites launching weekly. The community sites can be thought of as mini-PACEsConnections that support PACEs initiatives in cities, counties, regions, states, and nations. The network also supports interest communities such as PACEs in Education, PACEs in Pediatrics, and Parenting with PACEs, and organizational groups such as California Essentials for Childhood.
On ACEsTooHigh.com, articles receive from a few hundred to more than two million page views. Since its inception, ACEsTooHigh.com has also grown: in 2012, it had 471,000 page views and 3,600 visitors; by 2021, it had nearly 10 million page views and six million visitors.
Since 2012, PACEs Connection has used Marshall Ganz’ five-pronged approach to grow the PACEs movement — relationship building, storytelling, structure, strategy, and action. Our initial strategy focused on educating people and organizations about PACEs science, telling stories about people and organizations in different sectors who developed practice-based evidence that inspired others to take action, connecting people who were doing similar work, and developing a networking structure to support all this.
In our next phase, we are focusing focus on systems and policy change. That means creating a national scaffolding using distributed networking technology that links the “mini-movements” taking place in thousands of geographic- and interest-based communities, providing them tools to support their work, and then scaling up that approach. To accomplish this, we launched the PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities for communities that need advanced tools to measure progress, as well as more guidelines and services.
From these communities will emerge new healing-centered systems that integrate PACEs science from the start (for example, creating a healing-centered system that merges schools and healthcare…something that the State of Oregon is developing) and that can be replicated throughout the world. Our relationship-building and storytelling continues; we have seen those elements light a fire of participation, innovation and sea-change across the world.
Carey Sipp 