Blog

Seattle City Council members took their seats on Sept. 19 with the unhurried pace of business as usual. One of them called for public comments, but after a few people spoke, a commotion erupted in the back of the chambers. Six black and brown people shuffled down the central aisle, bounded by chains on their wrists, ankles, and stomachs. Some were clad in orange jumpsuits, while others wore black shirts bearing the phrase “Block the Bunker” in white letters. White activists donning police...

“She’s coming!” California sunlight filters through the dust hanging over the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo as friends and relatives get ready to watch 13-year-old Kysariah Brinson compete in the junior barrel-racing contest. When the announcer calls her name, Brinson — who also goes by K.K. — bursts into the ring with a surge of speed, her cowboy hat cocked low over her forehead. A box in the stands filled with classmates and families from her riding program, Spurred Up, explodes in...

I recently attended a presentation by Gabriella Grant from the CA Center of Excellence for Trauma-Informed Care. I was introduced to the polyvagal theory and how it influences safety, self-regulation and self-protection. It was very intriguing. How are others incorporating this work into their practices? Check out Dr. Stephen Porges website to learn more. http://stephenporges.com/

The Power of Human Connection Traditional Peacemaking is a system of resolving conflicts that Navajos used long before contact with Europeans. It is built upon K’e, and the fundamental idea is to restore relationships and harmony, rather than to assign guilt and punishment. Even though the Peacemaking system of justice and healing is foreign to mainstream American culture, and the antagonistic nature of the American courts, the tribe has, since the 1980s, made Peacemaking part of the tribal...

Please check out this new policy brief from the National Prevention Science Coalition. Hopefully a valuable resource for many of us out there!

Before the gold standard in HIV treatment—called HAART, for “highly active antiretroviral therapy”—came along in the mid-90s, untreated people could expect to live about 10 years after they were infected by HIV. HAART, a combination of several HIV drugs, transformed HIV from a death sentence to a chronic, survivable condition, prolonging life by several decades. Within two years of becoming available, it lowered HIV mortality rates by 80 percent. A New York Times story from 2001 describes...

year ago, Penelope sat alone in her darkened bedroom, numbed out on drugs. It was her junior year in high school. She’d quit the volleyball club after showing up high too many times. Her grades were mostly Cs and Ds. College seemed out of reach. And rehab? She tried that, for four months, but when she got out, she surrendered to the pressure to use again. “I was just really unhappy unless I was high,” she recalls. Today, Penelope (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) is a...

Over the last two decades, America has become increasingly polarized by both class and geography. As the middle class and its neighborhoods have declined, our nation has increasingly divided into rich and poor, and neighborhoods of concentrated affluence have become surrounded by larger spans of concentrated disadvantage. This pattern is both reflected and reinforced by housing prices. An analysis released today by the real estate company Trulia finds considerable overlap between racial...

As the resistance to President Donald Trump’s regime begins to organize and distinguish itself from the Democratic Party, it faces a question of tactics. Marches can be energizing, especially for newcomers, but when they don’t lead anywhere (in a larger sense), they can turn dispiriting. Property destruction — anarchists sometimes jokingly call it “smashy smashy” — gets media attention and can shut down a fascist recruiting party, but broken glass and fire sometimes scare the wrong people...

A harsh light is cast these days on what divides us. But Americans fundamentally agree on many things. Perhaps first and foremost: that all of our kids deserve a shot at achieving the American Dream. Two organizations not known for shared ideology — the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the progressive Brookings Institution — recently laid out a blueprint for action to make sure that the opportunity to succeed is not just a dream for some but a reality for all. It's called...

A few months ago, not long after I announced that 2017 would be the year I would step down as president and CEO of this remarkable organization, I experienced a deeply moving and defining moment. It happened during our annual Culture of Health Prize celebration, when the Foundation honors the men and women of communities across the nation who are working to make their towns, their tribes, their cities, and their neighborhoods as healthy as they can be. These are people who are passionate...

In Albany, trauma-informed policy change means working from the top down as well as the bottom up. After years of advocacy from HEARTS (Healthy Environments and Relationships That Support), along with trainings for the state’s Department of Health conducted by one of the network’s leaders, New York agreed in December 2015 to add questions about ACEs to its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. “That’s huge, because policy-makers look at that data and use it to make...