Blog

Trauma Awareness & Resilience Institute for Youth Workers

Marisa Luse is pictured above, on the right. Marisa Luse was accustomed to juggling multiple roles: as the mother of a three-year-old son, a parent ambassador for the Boston Children’s Museum and a board member for the Boston Association for Childbirth Education. She was used to helping youth and families access and achieve their goals: a healthy family, a school-ready child. But when leaders of a Community Organizing for Family Issues (COFI) training asked Luse to name priorities for her...

This is Part Four of the State of the States 2018 series. As President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress set out to impose tougher restrictions on welfare, their conservative allies across the country are trying to help them accomplish their mission, state by state. Republican governors and state legislators are moving ahead with proposals that would make it harder for people to get and keep welfare benefits and restrict what benefits they get. Measures already have been...

The Trump administration has prioritized reducing immigration by any and all possible means, a pursuit that literally brought the government to a standstill this weekend. While the nation tries to decipher the mixed messages coming from the White House and Congress scrambles to develop a reform agenda that will garner bipartisan support, it's easy to survey our national conversation about immigration and see only anger, dysfunction, and a fundamental disagreement about what it means to be an...

On top of America’s long-running political divide between red and blue states, and its widening economic divide between the rich and the poor, there is a troubling gap between its geographic winners and losers. The United States is growing spatially more unequal, in ways that are ripping the country apart and threaten to undermine prosperity for all of us. New data released earlier this week by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program get to the...

I identify as an activist, and I am tired. Not yet ready to move on to some dreamscape. Hoping to be re-energized. But very, very tired. Part of the reason I’ve reached this level of exhaustion is that I seem to be living what life would look like if ‘painted into a corner,’ met ‘put in a box’ in a car wreck, leaving the two a tangled idiomatic mess. Yes, this ‘painted box’ in which so many activists of so many kinds seem to find themselves stuck is all the harder to escape for its...

IF THE GOAL OF REENTRY programming is to empower people returning from incarceration to make the most of their lives, then the system is failing women. While so many wise women have warned against our relying solely on men, the correctional settings that I’ve visited appear either not to have those aunties among their leadership, or not to have taken the message to heart. As a result, they make reentry harder for women who are not in relationships with men, or who desire relationships with...

At the headquarters of Covenant House Washington in Southeast D.C., a nonprofit serving youth experiencing homelessness, ten twin-sized black canvas cots fill a white-tiled alcove on the main floor. The space serves as an emergency shelter for homeless young people, which Covenant House calls “The Sanctuary.” In keeping with its name, the walls are a deep, soothing blue. Five of the cots are for women and five for men, which is far short of the demand. The room is empty now, in...

California students and parents have been at the forefront of a national movement to promote common-sense school discipline policies, and their hard work is paying off. According to data recently released by the California Department of Education , our state is suspending fewer students, promoting alternatives to harsh school discipline and helping more young people stay in school. Many education and health leaders are jubilant. Limiting suspension-first approaches to handling discipline...

This blog post emerged as I saw that it's not always clear what can be done to heal from the effects of trauma. I'd never heard of any of these approaches when I was a family physician and have discovered others over time. The tools I introduce here include books and therapies for healing the effects of many different kinds of trauma. While I focus specifically on chronic illness, these books and approaches are also helpful for mental health conditions and other symptoms including PTSD,...

Donald F. Schwarz, vice president for program at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation , invited people to stand: Who among the attendees at the 2017 Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) National Summit —more than 170 scholars, educators, social service providers, policy-makers and activists—felt passionate about storm water management? Few rose from their seats. Donald Schwarz Schwarz then connected the dots: communities with poor storm water management—which tend to have lower...

Homelessness is often seen as a persistent and intractable problem. According to the latest statistics, over 553,000 people experience homelessness on any given night in the U.S. The problem is especially acute in California, where approximately 24 percent of those experiencing homelessness live, and especially in Los Angeles County, where on an average night, an estimated 55,000 people — almost 10 percent of the national total — are homeless. In addition, LA County has the highest...