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By Emily Davies, Photo: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, August 3, 2022 From behind bars at the D.C. jail, Sylvester Jones could sense that the streets in his city were even more dangerous than when he was picked up on a gun possession charge in January. He had read about the especially violent past week in the District — when at least three dozen people were shot in incidents across the city — and he had an idea about how to help. D.C. should create an incentive...

In this special episode of Transforming Trauma, the NARM Training Institute presents a summertime gift to Transforming Trauma listeners: a special topic webinar from the NARM Inner Circle online program. This webinar provides a window into the Inner Circle learning community where helping professionals from around the world come together to learn more about the NARM approach to resolving Complex Trauma. In this webinar, NARM and Intergenerational Love, NARM creator Dr. Laurence Heller and...

Innovative research to support community initiatives

Nearly 4 million babies are born each year in the United States, with statistics showing a slight decline in births in 2021 to 3.7 million. Currently, the majority of births (98.4%) happen in hospital settings (MacDorman & Declercq, 2019). Before the pandemic, one quarter to one third of birthing parents reported their births as traumatic (Simkin, 2016). The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, with an exponential number of women nearly dying (severe...

August 2022 Newsletter August is Back-to-School Month in California In this edition of the ACEs Aware newsletter, we share several education resources, including a new video in the Storytelling Series about the impact that educators at Laguna High School in Sonoma County are having by employing trauma-informed care to mitigate the impacts of toxic stress in their population of at-risk students. We also share resources for addressing ACEs in a K-12 environment from our friends at PACEs...

Safety plans serve as a great resource for individuals to practice healthy coping skills and develop a sense of safety and security that can carry them through a crisis. Last week, we discussed the basics of creating your first personalized safety plan . Now, it’s time to discuss how an organizational safety plan can support your trauma-informed agency—and how to build one. If you work with an organization, sharing how to create an individual safety plan with your team members is a great...

August is Family Fun Month, and the HOPE National Resource Center is all about families creating positive childhood experiences (PCEs) by having fun together! Throughout the month, there are several days to remember that promote PCEs and the Four Building Blocks of HOPE: Exercise with your Child Week – Starting August 7 th : There are so many ways to exercise or get moving with your children. People of different mobility levels can share in a day of intentional, and fun, exercise; from...

By Christina Caron, Illustration: Lucy Jones, The New York Times, July 29, 2022 Christina, who lives in Portland, Me., said she felt ignored by doctors for years. When she was 50 pounds heavier, her providers sometimes blamed her body size when she discussed her health concerns. One instance occurred weeks after she had fallen off her bike. “My elbow was still hurting,” said Christina, 39, who asked that her last name be withheld when discussing her medical history. “I went to my regular...

By Lauren Sausser, Photo: Westend61/Getty Images, Kaiser Health News, August 1, 2022 When Jennifer Lucier and her husband found out they were expecting a baby in 2016, they immediately made three phone calls. The first was to her mother. The second was to her husband’s family. And the third was to the Roper St. Francis Healthcare Learning Center. That last call, she felt, was particularly urgent. Lucier wanted to secure a spot for her unborn infant on the day care’s long waiting list. Lucier...

By Lina Tran, Photo: Jeff Gritchen/Digital First Media/Orange County Register/Getty Images, Grist, July 29, 2022 With his landmark climate bill seemingly dead in the Senate, President Joe Biden had been facing mounting pressure to find ways to take climate action that didn’t rely on Congress. It looked like one holdout Democrat, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, stood in the way of passing any version of Build Back Better, insisting just two weeks ago that he would refuse to support any...

By Jamiles Lartey, Photo: Steven Hirsch/New York Post/Associated Press, The Marshall Project, July 30, 2022 If there’s one story of wrongful conviction that most people know, it’s that of the Exonerated Five. The New York City teens, all Black or Latino, were convicted in the 1989 rape of a Central Park jogger, and incarcerated for six to 14 years each before another man confessed. Few people remembered that there was a sixth defendant on that indictment: Steven Lopez, who had accepted a...

By Kristoffer Tigue, Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, Inside Climate News, July 29, 2022 For 13 years, Reed Hundt has chased the idea of a national green bank, but to no avail. As CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, a global incubator for green banks, Hundt has long believed in the green bank financial model of leveraging limited public resources to attract private investors for clean energy projects that governments have been reluctant or can’t afford to support by themselves. He...