Blog

I am so very grateful to have had the opportunity to sit down with this compassionate soul whom I personally consider to be a trauma-informed guru in the trauma movement. Thank you, Jim Sporleder (I now know how to properly pronounce your name! Ha!) for all you have done and continue to do to spread awareness about the critical need of becoming trauma-informed individuals so as to meet the growing need in our schools and society.

You can do the work necessary to live fully alive in spite of ACEs. It takes persistence, a constant connection to the part of you that knows without a doubt that you can heal, that you no longer want to just survive among the living dead. Sometimes it’s messy and even painful to resolve but from my perspective it’s totally worth it. Feel that primal urge inside you to come alive and live authentically whatever that means to you. Back then you had to compromise to survive. Now it’s time to f

This initiative will develop, pilot, evaluate and implement an evidence-based, infant mortality-focused home visiting curriculum to support maternal and infant health, prenatally through age one. Who: NICHQ is working in partnership with these Ohio organizations: Ohio Department of Health; Stacy Scott, PhD, MPA, of the Baby 1st Network and the Global Infant Safe Sleep Center; and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Two communities will pilot the model. Funder: The project is funded by the Ohio...

Dr. Petering and the MyPath Program are part of an ongoing partnership supported by SPY’s 4-year Innovations contract with LA County’s Department of Mental Health. “You need to try mindfulness and Yoga. It’s hard to live in the streets when you are homeless, people can’t live like that. The pain is too much, it’s too stressful and some people can’t handle it, so they take their own life. Let’s try these mindfulness techniques and yoga poses and see how much it will change, and things will...

Mental health is at the forefront of gun violence prevention conversations among Texas legislators this session, but advocates for people with mental illness are wary of that focus. After the Santa Fe High School shooting in May that left 10 dead and 13 others wounded, Gov. Greg Abbott held a series of roundtable discussions around school safety that resulted in proposals like more resources for school safety personnel and closing gaps around mental health access. He named school safety as...

Last Wednesday, March 13th, I had the opportunity to present a Legislative Lunch and Learn to legislators, legislative staff, administrative staff, and the public in the Alaska State Capitol Building. To a room of ~ 30 - 40 people munching on lunch provided by the Alaska Children's Trust , and broadcast live via Gavel to Gavel (now archived here ), I had the honor to premiere the policymaker version of our History and Hope curriculum. This curriculum, and the policy-maker version, was...

Dear ACEs Connection Members: We are pleased to offer all ACEs Connection members the opportunity to watch Broken Places and to discuss the film and how screenings can help communities gather, start and grow on Twitter tomorrow night. So far, thousands of people have registered, and we are excited about this virtual screening and Twitter event. If you haven't registered yet, and would like to do so, there are only a few hours left to do so. Registration deadline: today, March 20th, at 12...

Particularly we who passed through ACE’s have difficulty with our feelings. In this article we explore how to feel, and how to feel better. Our example is how one individual turned the label “cancer” into a liberating experience. I know this sounds illogical, but you choose and want to feel however you feel. Whether you feel overjoyed at news you were looking forward to, or grief, loneliness or even agonizing despair, you are creating the situation the causes you to feel those emotions. The...

Elaine Miller-Karas, executive director and co-founder of the Trauma Resource Institute, has been invited to attend the launch in New Delhi, India, of a special program initiated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Miller-Karas is one of the key developers of the Trauma Resiliency Model® (TRM) and the Community Resiliency Model® (CRM) – biological-based models designed to help people recover from toxic stress. Miller-Karas has shepherded the Trauma Resource Institute since its birth in 2006 into...

Ivanka Trump has waded into the child care debate again with vocal support for a proposed one-time influx of $1 billion to the federal Child Care Development Fund, which provides states with money for subsidizing care. The money, which is listed in addition to the $5.3 billion for child care also included in the White House’s proposed budget, would be available to states willing to compete for it in part by eliminating requirements or regulations that can make it harder to run child care...

As head of New York City's correctional health services, Dr. Homer Venters spent nine years overseeing the care of thousands of inmates in the jails on Rikers Island. Though he left Rikers in 2017, what he witnessed on the job has stayed with him. "What's important to consider about jail settings is that they are incredibly dehumanizing, and they dehumanize the individuals who pass through them," Venters says. "There is not really a true respect for the rights of the detained." Venters is...

An oft-told urban success story is that of Medellín, Colombia. Under Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord that inspired the Netflix show Narcos, the city was one of the most violent places on Earth in the 1980s and early '90s. And then it became one of the most innovative —a " model city ." The reasons for that transformation are complicated. But one key driver was the local government's focus on changing the socio-cultural narrative, which gave rise to the concept of cultura ciudadana or...