Can Jacob's Mission Community Center Prevent the next School Shooting?

In a world reeling from the latest high school shooting, families sit around dinner tables and discuss gun control matters.  Others fumble through or add to vitriol on social media about the right or wrong way to protect school kids.  What is most misunderstood, however, is that the answers to solving these problems are in the field of healing early childhood trauma.  

No one wants to think of Nikolas Cruz as anything more than a monster, but he never had the chance to recover from his deepest childhood grief, loss, and attachment problems.  At only five-years-old Nikolas witnessed his father’s death, later he was relentlessly bullied, his adoptive mother also died, and then he was fostered by family friends*.  Foster and adoptive parents in the trenches feel the weight and likelihood that more has happened to Nikolas that hasn’t yet been disclosed.  And sadly, these unresolved traumas have left a devastating wake on the world around him.

What can you do to prevent children with dark pasts from becoming the next school shooter?  How do you stop these kids from having a psychotic break that creates new traumas for others?  Instead of blaming parents, instead of fighting about gun rights, we have to focus at the core of their problems:  that’s exactly what the non-profit organization ASA Now is doing and why (despite incredible odds) they are moving forward to create Jacob’s Mission Community Center.

In a life touched by adoption or not, it is no longer an effective option to live obliviously unaware of what childhood trauma looks like in our communities.  Check out these national statistics**: “Girls in Foster Care Pregnant by 19 – 50%, Former Foster Kids in U.S. Prison – 74%, Incarcerated within 2 years of “Age Out” – 50%, and Former Foster Youth on Death Row – 80%.”

ASA Now’s mission is to “support and strengthen the most vulnerable population” by providing therapies, extra-curricular activities, food boxes, social connections, information and trainings on how to receive essential psychiatric counseling, medical services, and much more.  ASA Now is “committed to ensure that all families who have been touched by foster care succeed,” and prevention is at the forefront of their purpose, but their mission needs you to help raise the final amount to open the doors that will fill lives, hearts, and homes with the adequate healing that is still missing in our Arizona resources to help these broken children and their families recover. 

Tax deductible donations will help open the doors for Jacob’s Mission Community Center (click here).  To learn more about the center get involved today, and/or make a difference by helping fund ASA Now directly (click here).

Also, don't miss the ASA Now Fundraiser breakfast (click here) next week on Friday, March 23rd to build funds for Jacob's Mission Community Center. Funds will help make the center fully opened and functioning by 2019 for all of Arizona's foster or adopted children and their families. For only $30 individuals can participate in the fundraiser breakfast, and business sponsorships are listed below:

Notes:  THANK YOU to FosterArizona.org for being the original publisher of this article: THROUGH THE EYES OF A TEEN, HOW JACOB'S MISSION COMMUNITY CENTER CAN HELP CHANGE LIVES

*Information about Nikolas Cruz found published here with Canoe, here with Yahoo, and here with SunSentinel.

**Statistics found in the following studies and cited by the ASA Now Strategic Plan: 2015 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration of Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, US Department of Justice, the Casey Foundation and the National Foster Care Coalition.