Governors

Governors are uniquely positioned to move child protection from a fragmented, crisis-driven system into a coordinated, prevention-centered, trauma-informed framework that actually changes children’s lives and raises the quality of life in your state. Executive orders, budget proposals, appointments, and public platform can either leave child welfare to struggle in the shadows or make children’s safety and healing a non-negotiable priority across every state agency.

Use executive leadership to build safer, healthier systems for children. It starts with vision and public commitment: you can declare child trauma, abuse, and neglect statewide crises through executive orders or proclamations, elevating them alongside other major public-health threats. By creating a Children’s Cabinet or interagency council focused on child well-being and appointing a chief child advocate or similar cabinet-level role, you align policy and funding across education, health, justice, and child welfare and create clear accountability for child outcomes.

Your budget and legislative agenda can shift systems upstream. Through budget proposals, you can insist that more funding flow into home visiting, early childhood programs, crisis nurseries, mental health, and family preservation rather than primarily into investigations and institutions. Dedicated child-focused reserves or trust mechanisms can protect prevention and child-welfare funding during downturns. By tying grants and contracts to measurable outcomes, such as reduced re-abuse, fewer placement moves, and higher graduation rates for system-involved youth, you can move agencies from processing cases to improving children’s lives.

Require transparency and data integration. Make annual, disaggregated public reporting on maltreatment, fatalities, foster-care re-entries, school performance, and youth justice involvement, and strengthen fatality reviews so they are timely, multidisciplinary, and actionable. Modernizing and integrating data across child welfare, education, health, and justice allows high-risk patterns to surface earlier while respecting privacy.

Finally, you can embed trauma-informed and equity-driven standards, champion prevention, foster-care reform, and juvenile-justice improvements, and expand mental-health access and civic mobilization. By ordering statewide ACEs and trauma training, supporting kinship and stable placements, raising juvenile-justice minimum ages, expanding diversion and restorative justice, and leveraging Medicaid and state budgets to pay for trauma-informed care, you create conditions for deep, generational change. When you use your platform to lead public awareness campaigns and empower local leaders with model policies and incentives, scattered efforts become a coherent movement for prevention, healing, and accountability that reaches every county, classroom, and child.

Executive Vision and Public Commitment

Declare child trauma, abuse, and neglect statewide crises through executive orders or proclamations, elevating them alongside other major public-health threats. Creating a Children’s Cabinet or interagency council focused on child well-being, and appointing a chief child advocate or similar cabinet-level role, aligns policy and funding across education, health, justice, and child welfare and creates clear accountability for child outcomes.

Budgets, Legislation, and Measurable Outcomes

Through budget proposals, you can insist that more funding flow “upstream” into home visiting, early childhood programs, crisis nurseries, mental health, and family preservation rather than primarily into investigations and institutions. Dedicated child-focused reserves or “trust” mechanisms can protect core prevention and child-welfare funding during downturns. By tying grants and contracts to concrete outcomes—such as reduced re-abuse, fewer placement moves, and higher graduation rates—you can shift systems from case-processing volume to real improvements in children’s lives.

Transparency, Data Integration, and Fatality Review

Using executive authority requires annual, disaggregated public reporting on key indicators: maltreatment, fatalities, re-entries into foster care, school performance for system-involved youth, and youth justice involvement. Strengthen and standardize child-fatality and near-fatality reviews so they are timely, multidisciplinary, and produce actionable recommendations rather than hidden reports. Governors can also direct agencies to modernize and integrate data across child welfare, education, health, and justice so high-risk patterns surface earlier while still respecting privacy law.

Trauma-Informed and Equity-Driven Standards

Following states that have declared themselves “trauma-informed,” you can order statewide training on ACEs, trauma, and resilience for all child-facing employees. Embed trauma-informed requirements into procurement, licensing, and performance standards, and require regular equity audits to monitor and reduce racial, disability, and geographic disparities in reporting, removals, discipline, and outcomes. Executive backing is also critical for initiatives that use Medicaid and budget authority to pay providers for ACEs screening and trauma-informed care.

Prevention, Foster Care Reform, and Juvenile Justice

Champion expansion of evidence-based prevention programs, including nurse–family partnerships and family-support models, especially in high-risk zip codes. Push agencies to prioritize kinship and stable family placements, fund trauma-focused training and support for foster caregivers, and monitor foster-care outcomes through public dashboards. In juvenile justice, governors can support reforms to raise minimum ages, limit transfers of youth to adult courts, expand diversion and restorative justice, and require trauma screening and appropriate services for system-involved youth.

Mental Health Access, Public Messaging, and Civic Mobilization

By leveraging Medicaid authority and state mental-health budgets, you can increase coverage of trauma-informed care and expand school-based and telehealth mental-health services, particularly in rural and underserved areas. Using your public platform, lead statewide awareness campaigns about ACEs, trauma, and recovery and convene summits where survivors, practitioners, and policymakers share solutions. Governors can also empower local leaders by offering technical assistance, model policies, and incentives for mayors, counties, and school districts that adopt trauma-informed, data-driven approaches to child safety.

Stories and Lessons From the Field

A California governor elevated childhood trauma to a statewide priority by appointing a first-ever Surgeon General focused on ACEs and toxic stress, then funding the ACEs Aware initiative so Medi-Cal providers could be trained and reimbursed for routine ACEs screening—sending a clear signal that preventing and treating childhood trauma is as central to health policy as vaccines or cancer screening.

In Delaware, the governor signed an executive order declaring the state “trauma-informed” and directing the Family Services Cabinet Council to identify gaps in prevention, develop a comprehensive early-intervention strategy for children and caregivers, coordinate ACEs data across agencies, and ensure that all child-serving departments train staff on the health impact of ACEs and toxic stress.

Hawaiʻi’s governor went further by issuing an order that all executive departments work with a new Office of Wellness and Resilience to become trauma-informed, naming ACEs as a driver of lifelong health and stability, requiring each department to designate a trauma-informed care liaison, and even mandating trauma-responsive language in state contracts so that the trauma lens is baked into everyday government operations rather than limited to a single program.​

Extra Steps: One powerful extra step you can take is to treat every concern about child abuse and neglect in your state as both a policy challenge and an opportunity to strengthen the safety net around children.

Instead of only reacting after crises, you can direct agencies to collect and share clear, comparable data on investigations, removals, foster care stability, and child and family outcomes. Use that information to set measurable goals for safety, timely services, and family support.

When you also convene cross-agency teams (child welfare, health, education, courts, and community groups), prioritize trauma-informed and prevention-focused funding in your budget, and publicly commit to tracking progress, you turn individual tragedies into systemic learning and ongoing prevention work that reduces the chances vulnerable children will be missed in the future.​

Optional Next Steps:

When you treat child safety and trauma prevention as non-negotiable priorities—backed by executive action, budgets, data, and sustained public advocacy—you create conditions for deep, generational change. Your leadership can turn scattered efforts into a coherent movement for prevention, healing, and accountability that reaches every county, classroom, and child.

Here are national resources especially useful for governors and governor’s policy staff leading trauma-informed, child-focused agendas, with links embedded.

• The NGA’s Resource Guide on State Actions to Prevent and Mitigate Adverse Childhood Experiences and Trauma profiles concrete state initiatives (task forces, executive orders, data systems, cross-agency strategies) and summarizes lessons from the State Trauma and Resilience Network.​
• The companion NGA report State Actions to Prevent and Mitigate Adverse Childhood Experiences highlights case studies of governors’ offices leading ACEs and trauma-informed efforts across health, education, and justice.​
• CDC’s Policy Approaches to Preventing ACEs outlines specific policy levers and funding strategies state leaders can use to prevent ACEs and reduce long-term health and justice costs.​
• The CDC Adverse Childhood Experiences Prevention Resource for Action gives governors an evidence-based “menu” of strategies—economic supports, family programs, early-childhood services, school initiatives, and community safety investments—to embed in state plans and budgets.​
• CDC’s A Public Health Approach to Adverse Childhood Experiences explains how ACEs prevention can be integrated into state public-health infrastructure, cross-agency collaborations, and data systems overseen by governors.​
• NASHP’s Resources to Help Prevent and Address Adverse Childhood Experiences hub curates tools on Medicaid policy, screening, payment models, and multi-sector ACEs initiatives geared to state-level decision-makers.​
• The Trauma-Informed Care Implementation Resource Center – Policy Considerations offers options for advancing trauma-informed care through legislation, regulation, and Medicaid and other state financing—core levers for governors.​
• SAMHSA’s foundational framework Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach helps governors’ offices align agencies around shared trauma-informed principles and implementation expectations.​
• The NCSL report Adverse Childhood Experiences summarizes ACEs research and catalogs state legislative actions, giving governors a quick overview of where their state stands relative to peers.​
• The PACEs Connection guide Selected State-Related Resources compiles state task forces, executive actions, and model policies on ACEs and trauma-informed governance that governors can build on or replicate.​

Ten Best Blogs for more current information:

National Governors Association – Child & Family Well-Being / ACEs resources and blogs

• Child and Family Well-Being Learning Cohort (hub with updates and resources):

  • Child family well being (nga.org)

• Resource Guide on State Actions to Prevent and Mitigate ACEs and Trauma (PDF, with case examples and policy ideas):

  • Resource Guide State Actions Prevent Mitigate ACES June2023 (nga.org)