September 2018, Wendy Ellis, project director and co-principal investigator at Building Community Resilience, has been selected as a 2018 Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow. According to the Aspen Institute, "Ascend fellows are visionary, entrepreneurial leaders with bold ideas that can move the needle on health and well-being and offer concrete economic and social mobility pathways for children and their families. The Fellowship provides leaders the space and support to bring their ideas to life and scale." The BCR network and collaborative is based at the Redstone Center. Ellis created the BCR process and collaborative, now being implemented in five metro regions, to address the systemic inequities she sees as central to disparities and the range of poor outcomes transmitted in families and communities across generations. BCR is framed around what Ellis describes as the 'Pair of ACEs' - adverse childhood experiences in the context of adverse community environments. In her previous career as a journalist, Ellis saw multiple systems - from juvenile justice to child services to health care - fail the very children and families they were meant to serve. Implementation of the BCR framework is the focus of her doctoral studies and has been supported by $1.8 million in funding from the Kresge Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Ellis has consulted on the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities initiative in Dallas and Washington, DC, organized and moderated congressional briefings, and has been widely quoted on topics related to childhood trauma and community resilience.