Blog

In 2020, MARC (Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities) surveyed hundreds of ACEs, trauma, and resilience (ATR) networks across the country to learn more about their characteristics, goals, and technical assistance needs. Our findings spotlight the power and potential of ATR networks and opportunities to better support the broader movement for creating healthy, equitable, and resilient communities. The project conducted a national study of ATR networks in the United States to learn more...

Forward-Facing Face2Face: Overcome Toxic Stress by Hacking Your Nervous System This free short intensive webinar will give you the insight and tools to begin to rewire your anxious thoughts and emotions to live a life of self-regulation & intentionality. Most of these tools do not require a lot of time and just minimal effort, but should be done consistently to see lasting change. You will learn: Identify the true causes of stress in personal and professional life. Learn skills for...

Mary Ann Hanson grew up in Fortuna, a former lumber town situated on the Eel River in Humboldt County and a gateway to centuries-old redwoods into the Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Humboldt is also one of the two California counties with the highest percentage of residents whose ACE score is 4 or more. Hanson herself has an ACE score of 8. Given her roots in Humboldt, a mostly rural county with a population under 150,000, and the difficulties she faced growing up in a family with substance...

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021 CUMAC’s two-story facility in Northern New Jersey has the look and feel of a standard food bank, with a warehouse, a handful of trucks, a client-choice pantry, and even a small garden. In practice, the operation has a mission that goes much further than giving out food or even addressing the root causes of hunger. In the view of Executive Director Mark Dinglasan, problems related to food insecurity go back — way back — to childhood traumas and the harmful impacts they...

Fresno’s Milestones Tracker provides a map of organizations that have or are becoming trauma-informed. Each dot represents an organization. The dots are color-coded to a particular sector. The larger the dot, the more milestones they’ve done. The dots also provide the name of the organization If there’s one word that captures the engine behind Fresno’s flourishing PACEs Connection initiative, that word is “grassroots.” Just ask Jason Williams, the community manager for Fresno’s initiative...

There are no children who would not like to draw. And you can hardly find parents who would not have to buy coloring books for their kids. Especially if there are the best online stores for kids within arm's reach. Every parent wants to see a happy child. But, unfortunately, no one or almost no one pays attention to what is hidden behind the bright cover. And oddly enough, but psychologists also do not spend a lot of their time researching colorings, or rather, what they mean. Coloring...

“The past.” Undoubtedly, you have an emotional reaction just considering those two small words. They encapsulate a great deal of meaning for each of us, regardless of our situations, backgrounds, gender or race. As communities, we debate the proper role of historical figures from our imperfect past and we attempt to recall politicians who we have voted into office. The past is front of mind for us personally, and front-page news collectively. Is the past really in the past? Not always. Ask a...

By Katie Surma, Inside Climate News, September 19, 2021 For Chuck O’Neal, a lifelong outdoorsman and environmentalist, the moment of truth came on election night 2020, as results rolled in from perhaps the most partisan campaign season in American history. He wasn’t watching Trump or Biden. O’Neal had spent the past two years running a campaign in Orange County, Florida, based on an unorthodox legal doctrine that holds that rivers, mountains and forests should have legal rights, just like...

By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post, September 26, 2021 Adriana Bottino-Poage is 6 years old, with cherub cheeks and curls that bounce when she laughs. She likes soccer, art and visiting the library. She dreams of being a scientist and inventing a robot that can pull pollution out of the air. She wants to become the kind of grown-up who can help the world. Yet human actions have made the world a far more dangerous place for Adriana to grow up, according to a first-of-its-kind study of the...

By Rose Hackman, The Guardian, September 26, 2021 T he last week of July, as Gabby Petito and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, posted Instagram photos of themselves hiking barefoot in Utah’s Canyonlands national park, bronzed skin matching apricot-colored rocks, the body of Jerri Winters was discovered in Clinton Township, Michigan. Her boyfriend, Matthew Lewinski, immediately admitted to the police he strangled her last December, keeping her mutilated body in the basement of the home they shared...

By Anna Russell, The New Yorker, September 27, 2021 B efore the pandemic, Jane Goodall travelled three hundred days a year to speak to audiences about the climate crisis. “I used to do, like, three days in the Netherlands, three days in Belgium, three days in France,” Goodall, who is eighty-seven, recalled recently. In China or Australia, “it would be, like, two weeks, where they’d spread me through their country.” Everywhere she went, she met young people who were “angry, depressed, or just...

September 15-October 15 is National Hispanic Heritage Month . View a collection of Hispanic and Latino Heritage Events in the Commonwealth via the Governor's website . You can read about the history of the month and the importance of considerations of language, equity and justice during this month and beyond, as well as peruse a collection of resources , on NPR. Longstanding racism and the harms caused by the COVID-19 pandemic create significant strains on mental wellbeing. The pandemic has...