Blog

Our community was fortunate to have Dr. Dayna Long, the Medical Director for the Department of Community Health and Engagement at USCF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, as the Keynote Speaker for Early Childhood Brain Science: Nurturing Strong Mental Health on Monday, April 8th. Dr. Long guided a packed room of attendees through the current science and best practices for addressing adverse childhood experiences and reducing toxic stress to improve the health of all children. The work...

RESILIENCY TEAM TRAINING Cape May & Atlantic County School Districts- Southern NJ Applied Educational Neuroscience, the Brain and Adversity- “Stressed Brains Do Not Learn” Purpose: To provide training for school level teams on the latest research and strategies concerning Educational Neuroscience, the Brain, Stress and Adversity. To create school level “turnkey” teams focusing on the skills and organizational components necessary to create trauma sensitive AND trauma responsive...

I wanted to tell you about our SUMMER ACADEMY - TRAIN THE TRAINER - your opportunity to become a facilitator for Echo's Trauma & Resilience training. In June, we will be holding a 3-day intensive to train future Echo trainers and others who want to become facilitators in our 6-hour Trauma & Resilience training. Covering the basics, such as the Adverse Childhood Experience Study, the triune brain, the impact of trauma on the nervous system, trauma responses and trauma-informed care,...

A book for children who score 5 or more on the ACEs questionnaire .

Recent changes in immigration policy are presenting new and intense challenges to infants, toddlers, preschoolers and their families, and the teachers and programs that work with them. Families and programs are experiencing increased trauma due to the immigration climate. With funding from the Irving Harris Foundation, the BUILD Initiative has organized a series of webinars and blogs in partnership with the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) for providers, state policy leaders, and...

High school is stressful. Spending hours a day sitting hunched over small desks writing papers and taking notes only to go home and spend even longer working can take its toll on anyone. Not only is your body cramped, but you start to lose focus because you’re stressing over deadlines or upcoming tests. Well, Kofi Charu Nat Turner, a professor at UMass Amherst has a practice for you. It’s called “ Dynamic Mindfulness ” and he has been bringing it to the inner city New Jersey schools for...

When sordid revelations surfaced in recent years of how the sale of hundreds of enslaved laborers in 1838 saved Georgetown University from the cliff of financial ruin, the college quickly cobbled together a multipronged response. It held a ceremony to deliver an official apology. It summoned a working group to study how to make penance for the wrongdoing. It began giving descendants of the 272 enslaved people a bump in admissions. The Georgetown working group wrote that “we are convinced...

Evictions are destabilizing events that increase families’ financial stress and strip away the psychological and physical security of having a home. These effects are particularly traumatizing for children, who often suffer emotionally and academically. While these negative consequences are well researched , little evidence exists to estimate the number of children who are evicted during childhood. To help fill this knowledge gap, this study calculates the proportion of children born in...

Greg Grey Cloud stands in the middle of the arena, thumbs in his hip pockets, beside a black-and-white Paint who wanders and roots aimlessly in the dry sand. The space is slightly smaller than a high-school basketball court, walled in particle board with an arched roof of white plastic that seals in the warmth from the overworked radiant heaters on this chilly northern prairie morning. Mud from the pens outside clings to Grey Cloud's boots and to the bottoms of his jeans. He closes his eyes...

There have been dozens of mass shootings in the United States since Columbine. (For a graphic on major U.S. mass shootings, see: https://tmsnrt.rs/2IaGL5h ) In the United States from 2000 to 2017 there were 250 active-shooter incidents, resulting in 799 deaths and more than 1,400 people wounded, according to the FBI. But the number of people left to deal with the lasting effects of gun violence is far more difficult to track. The Rebels Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization...

Last month, an article titled “The Tragedy of Baltimore” in the New York Times Magazine described the upsurge in violence in a city long known for its “blight, suburban flight, segregation, drugs , racial inequality, [and] concentrated poverty.” At the center of the storm are transition-age youth, who too often face long odds and challenging futures in the communities where they live. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Patricia Cobb-Richardson , MS. For the past 20 years, she has...

[Daun Kauffman photo.] ____________________________________________________________ This morning, I thought about taking a sick day—a mental health day. Yesterday was a rough day in the classroom, a day that ended with a parent-teacher conference after school hours. It was a day that I laid my head on my desk during my planning period and resorted to my hidden candy stash in my bottom desk drawer. This morning, I thought, “I’ll take my first sick day.” I’d been saving them for months, coming...