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Luz Rivas knew the two dozen fifth-grade girls sitting before her. Not by name, but by experience. She once lived in tight spaces, shared homes, back houses, a garage. It was back in the 1980s, when she and her mother and sister would get squeezed out of one place, hear about another and start over again. It’s still that way for children in the Pacoima neighborhood around Telfair Elementary, only more so. “I hated that assignment in school when they asked you to draw your house,” Rivas, 44,...

When Stephanie Zarecky's daughter Scarlett was about 16 months old, she and her husband put her to bed with a mild cold and fever. Hours later, they discovered she had stopped breathing. Doctors had no explanation for what happened, and even now, going on two years since she lost Scarlett, Zarecky has no more information on what happened to her daughter. Infants and children like Scarlett die from unexplained causes at an alarming rate in the United States — but soon, Scarlett's Sunshine Act...

At NPQ, we’ve been digging into narrative: tracking the trends, observing our practice, and hearing from readers—particularly around race, a core design factor in the US and the world. So, a recent article proposing thinking of bigotry as a public health problem caught our attention. In it, Ronald W. Pies, professor of bioethics and humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University, applies the core criteria for a public health frame—that something is both harmful and contagious—to explore a new...

KQED News Monday, November 19, 2018 Sabrina Hanes has faced a lot of trauma in her life, most of it in her childhood. As part of her healing, she moved to a Northern California town called Paradise. There she built strength and community, but that was upended when the Camp Fire tore through Paradise, burning her home and turning her life upside down. I followed Hanes through her daily routine in Paradise last summer, to learn how she’s developed resilience. I then caught up with Hanes after...

The philanthropic world does a lot of good; some problems get solved by throwing a lot of money at them. In 2015, foundations gave away $62.8 billion to charities and nonprofits that do everything from fighting hunger and housing the homeless to retraining coal miners to curing cancer. But with a culture rooted in capitalism and endowments invested in Wall Street, bighearted foundations too often fail their missions. They are limited by the narrow mindset of the financial industry status...

For the second time in three years, life expectancy in the U.S. has ticked downward. In three reports issued Thursday , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid out a series of statistics that revealed some troubling trend lines — including rapidly increasing rates of death from drug overdoses and suicide. CDC Director Robert Redfield described the data as "troubling." "Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the Nation's overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup...

For those interested in a video format, here is my interview with Julie Brand - founder and executive director of A WISE Retreat program for women. Julie is an addiction specialist, domestic violence counselor, youth educator, and trauma-warrior with a personal ACEs score of 9+.

Now is the best time to get the lowest registration price for the 2nd Annual Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools Conference , hosted by the Attachment & Trauma Network, Slated for February 17-19, 2019 at the Washington Hilton, this conference includes 75 workshops from experts in trauma-informed education across the country and around the world. Early bird pricing of $395 ends at midnight Friday, November 30. Here's the registration link. Those needing to use purchase orders can contact...

A 5000 piece puzzle that was thrown up in the air and scattered amongst the fall leaves. That is how I imagined my life looked liked 6+ years ago. I was struggling with flashbacks, body memories, brain fog, panic attacks, insomnia and dissociation. My trauma history was coming crashing in on me and impacting EVERY area of my life. I no longer could pull myself up, dusting myself off and with head down barreling though life. I had to face my past and put together the pieces of that puzzle one...

In early November 2018, the AAP announced its first spanking recommendation in 2 decades. The updated policy statement strengthened its earlier call to ban corporal punishment and says spanking as a form of discipline harms children physically and mentally, in how they perform in school and interact with other children. ------ Robbyn Peters Bennett, a licensed professional counselor and early childhood trauma specialist in Portland, OR, founded a group called StopSpanking.org in 2012. She...

We have been banging the drum at Echo for some time now about trauma and how it gets stored in our bodies. We uphold the work of people like Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and other researchers who have concluded that talk therapy alone is not enough to release and overwrite the disruptive patterns trauma creates in our bodies. At our 2019 conference , Trauma Recovery: Community Evidenced Practices (March 18 & 19) you will be able to explore for yourself a variety of new and...

ACEs, Adversity's Impact Tackling trauma with your kids: "Being able to talk about it is important" Cracked Up Racism kills: What community-lead interventions can do about it Help for trauma in childhood 'fragmented' Punishment: What is it good for? Spanking in developing countries does more harm than god, study suggests Parenting to Prevent ACEs An understudies for of child abuse and 'intimate terrorism:' Parental alienation Childhood trauma: 'Hundreds of babies born addicted to drugs'...