Blog

I was on a Zoom call with a group of community health advocates, discussing the pandemic and meeting the needs of our most vulnerable children and families. A young woman said, “I hear people say, ‘We are all in this together.’ I agree. It feels like we are all on the Titanic, rich and poor, going down. But who gets a seat on the lifeboat?” There is so much historical trauma that can keep up apart. There are so many reasons why we must find a way to come together to ensure everyone survives...

Leaders in ACEs/trauma/resilience movements from 10 states in the Southeast U.S. met for a networking call on May 21, 2020, to learn about flexible funding opportunities for states under the CARES Act, ways to get involved in advocacy, and how to share their successes and challenges in building statewide coalitions. The meeting of leaders was organized by ACEs Connection and the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) in response to COVID-19 and the growing interest in...

By Claire Bryan, Chalkbeat, June 8, 2020 White students feel safer in the presence of police than black students, according to a recent survey of New Orleans students. The survey, conducted by Tulane University during the 2018-19 school year, showed that 69% of white students said they felt safer in the presence of police, while only 40% of black students said the same. The recent killing of George Floyd, a black man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, is fueling nationwide protests...

By Mark Baldassare, Rachel Lawler, and Lynette Ubois, Public Policy Institute of California, June 2, 2020 Millions of Americans across the country have taken to the streets, protesting the death of George Floyd and the deep, persistent conditions of racial injustice that plague our nation. In California, residents have turned out in large crowds, clashing with the police in cities large and small around the state. Before this latest public outpouring of grief and rage over the death of an...

By Shannon Firth, MedPage Today, June 8, 2020 Ed McDonald IV, MD, a black physician at the University of Chicago Medicine, understands the pain and frustration of his community in the wake of George Floyd's death. He knows what it feels like "to almost have my life inappropriately taken by police officers," McDonald said in an interview with MedPage Today. When he was 17 years old, he parked outside a bowling alley in a mostly white Chicago suburb, talking on his phone and waiting for...

By Huiling Feng, Justin S. Harty, Nathanael J. Okpych, and Mark E. Courtney, Chapin Hall at The University of Chicago, June 2020 A fundamental tenet of the federal Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 is that allowing foster youth to remain in care past their 18th birthday would improve their outcomes as adults. One of the most significant challenges transition-age foster youth face is homelessness. Foster youth experience disproportionately higher rates of...

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues

Yesterday, Carolyn Curtis completed the free twelve-week online class of her program Mind Matters: Overcoming Adversity and Building Resilience . It was an amazing experience! Between 550 to 425 people attended each session. Overall, 2,300 people attend at least one class. The first class on Self-Soothing now has close to 3,000 views. Participants reported that it helped them deal with the isolation of the shelter in place order. It was the one thing they looked forward to all week long.

Thursday, June 11, 2020 Education Upended, We're Back! Please join us for the ongoing community discussion of "A Better Normal — Education Upended". We bring bring our focus back to the future. Using our breakout session format, we will identify the strategies and lessons learned that we want to bring into the future of school, and ways in which we might do that. How do we create physical and psychological safety, especially in the face of so much uncertainty? What strategies can we use to...

By Theresa Harrington and Ali Tadayon, EdSource, June 10, 2020 Amid calls to defund municipal police in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, two Oakland Unified school board members are pushing to eliminate the district’s police force. This is an acceleration of a demand that dates back nine years, when activists began calling on the district to dissolve its police department after a black student was shot and killed by a district police sergeant. The proposal by board...

On June 10, 2020, we will #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM, and #Strike4BlackLives. In the wake of the most recent murders of Black people in the US, it is clear that white and other non-Black people have to step up and do the work to eradicate anti-Black racism. As members of the global academic and STEM communities, we have an enormous ethical obligation to stop doing “business as usual.” No matter where we physically live, we impact and are impacted by this moment in history. Our...

By Cailin O'Connor, 6/10/20, positiveexperience.org/blog ...The Strengthening Families framework identifies five protective factors, but of course there are far more than five possible strengths in people’s lived experiences. These strengths, and the positive experiences they facilitate, profoundly influence a child’s experience of adversity – including by making those adverse experiences less likely, by buffering a child from the negative effects of adversity, by restoring a sense of safety...