It started with a small group of passionate people meeting around a table, convinced their community needed to think differently about childhood adversity. Seven years later, more than 4,000 people across Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington have completed trauma-informed and resilience training, reaching a milestone that organizers say is both a reason to celebrate and a reminder of how much further there is to go.
The work has been driven by the Adverse Childhood Experiences and Resilience Coalition (ARC) KFL&A and Kingston Community Health Centres' social enterprise Teach Resilience, with financial and administrative support from the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area.
What began with a modest Community Foundation grant in 2019 has grown into a sustained, cross‑sector effort. Follow‑up funding allowed 37 local professionals to become certified through Community Resilience Initiative (CRI) to deliver Course 1: Trauma Informed, seeding a network of local trainers who could bring the content into their own organizations. In 2023, three‑day KFL&A Resilience Symposium recertified trainers and reached more than 450 people through 10 events at six locations.
“One of the things that sets our community apart is that so many people are now working from the same fundamental understanding,” says Bridget Glassco, convener of ARC at the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area. “That is quite unique to KFL&A.”
Central to that growth is a remarkable commitment from eight partner organizations that have made trauma-informed training available to all of their staff: Family and Children's Services of FL&A, Community Living Kingston & District, BGC South East, Kingston Community Health Centres, St. Lawrence Youth Association, Limestone District School Board, the City of Kingston, and Therapy Studio. Their institutional commitment has been a driving force behind the milestone number and a model for what whole-organization culture change can look like.
“One of the things that sets our community apart is that so many people are now working from the same fundamental understanding,” says Bridget Glassco, convener of ARC at the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area. “That is quite unique to KFL&A.”
"This is not a program, it's not a toolkit, it's a way of being," said Ann-Marie Macdonald, chair of ARC KFL&A and a recently retired principal. "Crossing that 4,000 threshold inspires us to believe that we are making inroads, and we'll continue to make inroads by creating a critical mass of people who have this knowledge base and can enact it in their daily lives."
For Garry Castle of KCHC's Teach Resilience and Pathways to Education, the number matters most for what it means in practice. He works daily with high school students facing significant barriers, and he sees the value of a community where partner organizations share the same foundational understanding.
"It's exciting that 4,000 people would have a firm understanding of what childhood adversity does to your brains, your bodies, your behaviour," Castle said. "And I feel like we're just starting."
Local organizers believe this coordinated approach offers a hopeful counter‑narrative at a time when communities are grappling with visible impacts of trauma, mental health challenges, and social inequities. They see the KFL&A model as a compelling example of how relatively small investments, shared infrastructure, and cross‑sector collaboration can add up to large‑scale culture change.
