Blog

The 6th Annual Making a Difference Conference for SESPs, Foster/Adoptive and Kinship Caregivers and their Professional Partners will be held in Marlborough, MA on November 14, 2017. The theme is A Community Approach to Trauma Sensitivity. There will be at least two talks will be about ACEs! Speakers/Topics: Keynote: Managing the Hearts and Souls of Many, Dana Royster-Buefort, M.Ed., C.A.G.S. Workshops Tackling ACEs by Building Resilient Communities , Renee D Boynton-Jarrett, MD, ScD . Note:...

Join Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) for a series of free, short (45-minute) webinars with national leaders who will share some of their expertise and engage in dialogue with you on key strategies for creating just, healthy and resilient communities. Seats are limited, but recordings will be available after each session. Register at MARC.HealthFederation.org/BrownBag for the following sessions: Thursday, September 7 @ 1pm ET Melissa Merrick, PhD —Preventing Child Abuse and...

ACE-Informed Workflows: Gundersen Health System — Denyse Olson-Dorff , PsyD and Afton Koball , PhD, ABPP As the landscape of healthcare changes, healthcare systems must respond with new approaches to improve the health of communities. Identifying and responding to social conditions that affect health have been suggested as important next steps in healthcare. Now 20 years old, the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) (Felitti, et. al, 1998) was among the first to show...

Advocates claim that raising the minimum wage would lift many families out of poverty and reduce income equality, but a new study contends that a rise in wages would also reduce child maltreatment. According to a study from Indiana University and University of Connecticut researchers released in the January issue of Children and Youth Services Review, neglect reports involving young children declined by 10.8 percent in response to a $1 increase in the minimum wage. According to University of...

When natural disasters strike, disabled people are among the most vulnerable. Disability acts as a multiplier, intensifying risk from both natural and human forces. Among other concerns , disabled people often cannot evacuate on their own, or they struggle to carry their medical equipment with them (which can be necessary for preserving life). Emergency services may ignore the needs of a disabled person—sometimes, according to experts in inclusive disaster relief, even blaming disabled...

When it comes to judging a school’s quality, what matters most? A new poll suggests the American public puts a premium on offerings outside of traditional academics, including career-focused education, developing students’ interpersonal skills, and providing after-school programs and mental-health care. At the same time, even as local schools were generally viewed favorably in the national survey, parents said they would consider taking advantage of vouchers for private or religious schools...

Bettie Douglas has worked at a McDonald's in St. Louis for 10 years. For the last three months, she's made $10 per hour. On Monday, when she got to work, she was working for $7.90 per hour. Douglas didn’t get demoted, she isn’t in trouble with her bosses, and she didn’t change jobs. What changed is that a new Missouri law went into effect Monday, capping the minimum wage across the state at $7.70. The law overturned higher minimum wages set by St. Louis and Kansas City, in effect cutting...

Would you take care of someone who had abused you as a child? It’s a hard question to answer and, really, it probably depends on a lot of variables but Tyler Perry recently revealed that he provides support for the man who raised him, despite a pretty dark history. While opening up on Oprah’s Master Class, Perry talked about his current relationship with Emmitt Perry Sr., the man who he thought was his father growing up. The older man was physically and emotionally abusive and the Hollywood...

As the debate over last Friday’s presidential pardon of Joe Arpaio , the former sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ continues to roil the nation, WitnessLA turned for comment to a law enforcement figure who frequently found himself at war with the self-styled “toughest sheriff” in America. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón , who served as chief of the Mesa, AZ police department between 2006-2009, possesses a trove of hard-won personal knowledge about how Arpaio works—perhaps more than...

Five core values for establishing a trauma-informed culture in your classroom and/or school. An emphasis on these values lead to a relationship-based culture.

Hello! We wanted to help conference attendees at our June 28-29 Beyond Paper Tigers Conference here in Walla Walla get a sense of the many "Paper Tigers" at work in Walla Walla. This 12-min. video features why a community-wide approach is so critical is helping to create a resilient community. We want to share it with other communities working toward the same goal of creating healthier, more connected communities, around the framework of the NEAR (neurobiology, epigenetics, aces, resilience)...

Today is the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and yet little progress has been made in preparing communities for better outcomes in disasters as we are seeing with Hurricane Harvey in Texas. Each year millions of children are disproportionately impacted and find themselves in great danger and traumatized by disasters disrupting their lives, families, schools, and communities. Despite the dangers of our reality, we are constantly witnessing an unacceptable lack of awareness when it comes...