Dominic Cappello

Dominic Cappello is a strategist, writer, designer, and educator. He is the creator of the Ten Talks book series published by Hyperion in 2000 and 2001. Ten Talks received national attention when Oprah Winfrey created a show around the book on sex and character in October 2000, featuring parents who had used the books' approaches to family communication.

Cappello is also the author (with Susan Duron, PhD) of the parent-focused HIV prevention program "Can We Talk?" developed by the National Education Association -Health Information Network through a cooperative agreement with the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Adolescent and School Health in 1999.

Cappello, working for the New Mexico Department of Health, developed the youth injury prevention project called the Resiliency Corps. The Resiliency Corps focused on the implementation of evidence-based youth injury, violence and substance misuse prevention strategies. The five year pilot project promoted community mobilizing around policies shown to reduce injuries and offered the course "Youth Safety, Health and Resiliency" at the University of New Mexico-Valencia.

He is the co-founder of Safety and Success Communities, a socially-engaged non-governmental non-profit organization in Santa Fe, New Mexico, focused on implementing a data-driven, cross-sector, and systemic strategy for the prevention of adverse childhood experiences and adverse social determinants of health. Cappello and Katherine Ortega Courtney, Ph.D. developed and implemented the Child Welfare Data Leaders Program, a management training program focused on data analysis, research, and continuous quality improvement for child welfare systems in New York City, Connecticut, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. Cappello co-authored (with Katherine Ortega Courtney, Ph.D.) Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment, published in 2018.

Cappello now serves as the co-director of the Anna, Age Eight Institute focused on the data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and social adversity. Cappello and his Anna, Age Eight Institute co-director Katherine Ortega Courtney, Ph.D. are focused on using a data-driven, cross-sector and county-focused strategy throughout New Mexico to prevent and treat adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the adverse social determinants of health. Their approach, detailed in their book 100% Community: Ensuring 10 Vital Services for Surviving and Thriving, is informed by the research behind the social determinants of health, racial justice, collective impact, the social-ecological model, and health equity, acknowledging health and education disparities. Their 100% Community initiative mobilizes local change agents, elected officials, and stakeholders, working to ensure that all county residents have access to behavioral health care, medical care, stable shelter, secure food, and transportation to vital services. Once these services for survival are in place, further mobilizing focuses on securing access to parent supports, early childhood learning programs, community schools, youth mentoring and job training. It has been twenty years since the original Adverse Childhood Experience Study,[1] with little to show for systemwide prevention efforts on a national or statewide level to reduce the impact of ACEs and toxic stress.[2] A critical assessment[3] of the ACEs Study was published that recommends that prevention work focus on the social determinants of health.[4] Cappello and Ortega Courtney are also the authors of David, Age 14: Who and what determine our children's health, education and future and the fully illustrated social satire Attack of the Three-Headed Hydras.