1. Gets a healthy start in life

• Communities have multiple interventions to prevent children's exposure to adverse childhood experiences as well as opportunities for adults to heal and therefore become better parents.
• Communities pay adults a living wage and thereby eliminate poverty. 
• All parents have access to high quality daycare
• All children have access to high quality education

2. Is supported by a healthy life style growing up and in maturity in which sources of traumatic and toxic stress are minimized.

• Communities are committed to nonviolence, do not tolerate bullying, and address any issues of around a loss of safety

3. Guards the perimeters

• Communities are able to create, reinforce, and maintain healthy social norms
• Children are oriented from early childhood around those social norms and expectations

4. Accurately recognizes various source of danger

• Communities recognize moral, social, psychological as well as physical manifestations of danger and community members are educated about these sources of danger.

5. Accurately identifies the sources of those dangers

• Communities avoid simplistic blame-and-punish strategies and instead seek out the real source of danger in every instance, usually requiring root cause analyses with multiple sources of information and input.
• Communities are aware that buried conflicts are often the seeds for later dangerous attitudes and activities and therefore places an active emphasis on conflict management methods that are effective.

6. Effectively responds to the dangers

• Community adopts problem-solving approaches and tools that are able to respond to the complexity of every situation.
• Community constantly learns from these approaches, as well as its own successes and failures in problem-solving and is able to challenge its own mental models when the approaches do not appear to be working to resolve the problems.

7. Gathers information over time

• Community values memory, keeps good records that are accessible to the future, and carefully evaluates its own responses to events.

8. Stores information over time and is able to access that information later when needed

• Because the community values memory as a source of knowledge for the future, records are fully developed, present multiple points of view, and summarize lessons learned.

9.  Learns from experience and adapts to change

• Because memory is retained for previous responses - both successful and failed - the community learns from its own experience but is similarly able to mobilize adaptive responses to changed conditions instead of compulsively repeating the past.

10.   Has specialists to deal with different kinds of problemd

• In every community there will be those who have special expertise in addressing complex problems. 

11.   Returns to normal alert status when acute danger has passed

• Responses to situations that endanger established social norms is prompt and efficient, but are ended when the problems have been assessed to be resolved.

12.   Includes the entire body

• Everyone in a community must be involved, even in a minor way.
• Groups or individuals who have not been involved are likely to become a source of future problems - "people support what they have helped to create and if they haven't helped to create it, they won't support it"