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Eleven years ago my friend Sally was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, the degenerative motor-neuron disease which gradually renders you unable to move, to eat, to talk, and in the end to breathe. She had just turned 40, two kids, happily married to a prince of a guy, so much to look forward to, for all of them. And then this horrible suffering. This “very slow car crash” was her husband’s description and I can’t get that image out of my head. The wreckage, the...

By Jared Brey, Next City, November 10, 2020 The presidential election was still far from being decided last week when Ruy Arango, chair of the “No Eviction Without Representation” (NEWR) campaign in Boulder, Colorado, told Boulder Beat that he’d seen enough. Ballot measure 2B, which would levy a tax on landlords to fund legal representation for tenants facing eviction, was ahead by a healthy margin. Arango and the NEWR campaign were “pretty confident” it would pass, and he was going to bed,...

By Chandra Bozelko, Center for Health Journalism, November 9, 2020 During the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett, the newest Supreme Court Justice, Democratic senators displayed poster-size photos of people who could lose their health insurance if the Supreme Court rules the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional in Texas v. California. One of those photos could have been my release mugshot, taken on March 18, 2014 as I left prison after more than six years inside. When I came home,...

By Gabe Salazar and Meryl Schulman, Center for Health Care Strategies, November 13, 2020 Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — such as abuse, neglect, family dysfunction, exposure to violence, and being subjected to prejudice and racism — can negatively impact a child’s developing brain and body, as well as long-term health and social outcomes. In New Jersey, over 40 percent of children are estimated to have experienced at least one ACE , and 18 percent are estimated to have experienced...

By Anna Louie Sussman, The New York Times, November 13, 2020 Last week, as Americans were obsessing over the results of the presidential election, a New Zealand law aimed at eliminating pay discrimination against women in female-dominated occupations went into effect . The bill, which takes an approach known as “pay equity,” provides a road map for addressing the seemingly intractable gender pay gap. Unlike “equal pay” — the concept most often used to address gender pay disparities in the...

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I was caught off guard yesterday as I sat staring out the window, watching the rain pour and trickle down the glass. The smell of fresh laundry and the tobacco candle burning in the kitchen is beyond calming. The sound of Killswitch Engage softly echoed in the background from my desktop speakers; I recognize the irony even typing this. And at that moment, I had an overwhelming sense of emotion run over me. For the first time, I realized that I am in it; I am on my vision quest. Historically...

By Dialynn Dwyer, Boston.com Staff November 13, 2020 “People become afraid to share their exposures, symptoms, and test results with each other, with contact tracers.” A Harvard infectious disease epidemiologist is warning that “shame and blame” perpetuate stigma around COVID-19 and break down public health efforts aimed at controlling the spread of the virus. Julia Marcus, of Harvard Medical School, explained on Twitter Friday how stigma around the virus is “toxic” to public health.

It’s true. I’m not sure if anyone told you yet, but you’re allowed to disconnect from the healing journey for a little bit. We get so caught up in doing all of the things that sometimes we forget that we are allowed to live. To be alive isn’t a series of habits and routines and practices that overtake your life. To be alive is to find the present moment, indulge in it, and to take a little bit of it with you. This trauma healing game is exhausting; wake, meditate, journal, do yoga, set...

After watching the excellent webinar Episode 6 of Cracked Up, the Evolving Conversation: Healing Trauma, I thought it was timely that CNN posted this piece: Former White supremacist: This is how to tackle hate and bigotry In the piece, the author makes the connection between his own ACEs and other trauma and his, as he puts it, addiction to hate. Here is a link to the piece: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/opinions/former-white-supremacist-how-to-tackle-hate-buckley/index.html

Resilience, the ability to overcome adversity, is not an innate skill or genetic trait. Resilience is the ability to recover after adversity strike. None of us escape trauma, at some point in our lives, we will each face at least one overwhelming events that test our capacity to recover. Resilience is a quality that is develops from experiences where a person, even a baby, must deal with manageable stress and is supported enough to recover. It’s not a quality that you are born with, or...

From Stanford Social Innovation Review, November 2020 As our nation reckons with its history of racial injustice, how can philanthropy change its theories and methods of giving in order to contribute to positive social change? What does allyship look like as we move into a new decade, rife with calamity and crisis, at a time when a global pandemic has exacerbated the systemic inequities that devastate the most marginalized among us? [ Please click here for more information and to register .]