TALKS
Dr. Natalya Bannister Roby | Poverty Interrupter
The ACE score, the standard measure of Adverse Childhood Experiences, has taught a generation to read childhood adversity as a forecast of future damage. Dr. Natalya Bannister Roby’s research asks what the score leaves out. Studying leaders who survived the kinds of childhoods the ACE framework identifies as high-risk, she found that the same experiences associated with later struggle had also forged real leadership capacity.
The wound and the capacity live in the same person. Dr. Bannister Roby invites us to see both, and to follow “What happened to you?” with the question the score was never built to answer: What did it build?
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Dr. Natalya Bannister Roby is President and CEO of Episcopal Children's Services (ECS4Kids), one of the Southeast's largest early learning providers, and only the third leader in its 60-year history. She is responsible for 1,100 employees serving 30,000 children and families across 24 counties in Florida and Georgia, and has guided the organization through the most ambitious period of growth in its history, including its first expansion beyond Florida. Her path to ECS4Kids ran through the Boys & Girls Clubs and Pace Center for Girls, and through Tallahassee, where she helped pass bipartisan legislation that lets young people clear their juvenile records so one bad year stops following them into adulthood.
