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Around 4 p.m. on a recent Friday, Fiorella Guevara got around to eating her lunch. Then she leaned back in the student-sized chair where she was sitting in an empty classroom and let out a long sigh. “Oh man, I’m tired,” said Guevara, the new community-school director at M.S. 50 in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. “This is why I never sit down for too long.” Instead, she bounds from room to room, checking on the classes she oversees, meeting with the principal or calling up parents,...

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A few years ago, I would have looked at this headline — Los Angeles County Jail moms can provide breast milk for their kids in lactation pilot program — and thought: “Awww. How nice of the jail staff to implement this program.” Now, after years of being steeped in research about childhood adversity and how babies need that vital attachment to their moms to have a healthy start to life, my immediate reaction is: “What the hell are they thinking?” The story explains how a woman gave birth to a...

Alaska conducted a Victimization Survey for 2015 and released what it characterized as positive improvements. With a sample of 3,027 women, the results claimed a substantial reduction in intimate partner violence (IPV) from 2010 to 2015. The claim is that IPV dropped by 33% and sexual violence dropped by 32%. This is a typical representation about the rate of drop. If you look at the percentages, IPV went from 9.4% to 6.4%. Sexual violence went from 4.3% to 2.9%. I have two issues with the...

Paid family leave might lead to reduced risk of abuse-related head injuries in young children, according to a new study. Researchers compared data from 1995 through 2011 in California -- which introduced paid family leave in 2004 -- with seven states without such a policy: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts and Wisconsin. After California introduced paid family leave, there was a decline in rates of hospital admissions for abuse-related head injuries in children...

An African-American, 12-year-old boy is arrested and taken into custody for carrying a weapon in Washington, D.C., while waiting for the bus. The weapon, an empty glass beer bottle, would allegedly have been used to hurt city residents, but police are able to search his bag and find the weapon before a crime is committed. Had the offender been just a few years older, he would be eligible to be tried in adult court. Yeah, it's a scenario. Actually, as Bryan Stevenson , executive director of...

You may have read something like this over the past few weeks, in the run-up to this year's hotly contested Academy Awards ceremony: "The fact that there is an absence of African-American nominees at the awards this year is something I'm less concerned about than how that reflects on what's happening within the industry," [the film producer Preston Holmes told a reporter]. "We need more opportunities for African-American filmmakers and crafts people. There needs to be more of an...

I feel duty-bound to post this link: http://omeleto.com/222213/

This month at Partner for Healing we have focused on responding to common staff concerns about implementing trauma-informed care. I’m sure you have heard all of these! On Partner you can get some ideas about how to respond. We would also be interested in other concerns you hear, and also other responses you have found effective. Please put these in the comment section. You can also download a PDF summary of all of these. The concerns we cover are: If we stop giving severe consequences, chaos...

Starting today, the U.S. Senate takes up the bipartisan Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA, S. 524) to address the national crisis of opioid drug addiction. The legislation—authored by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rob Portman (R-OH)—gives states tools to “prevent drug abuse, treat addiction, and reduce overdose deaths.” The prevention section of the bill calls for a “federal inter-agency task force to review, modify, and update best practices for pain management and...

Karen Clemmer’s “aha” about ACEs came at a lunch meeting with a colleague who worked in early childhood intervention and Jane Stevens, creator of social networking sites ACEsConnection and ACEsTooHigh. Clemmer, Coordinator of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health for Sonoma County’s Department of Health Services, had heard of Vincent Felitti’s work and found it interesting. But that day’s lunch conversation persuaded her to share the research on ACEs and resilience with everyone she knew.

In last month’s column I focused on the significance of the emotional culture that exists in an organization, especially citing the article “Manage Your Emotional Culture” that appeared in the January/February 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2016/01/manage-your-emotional-culture . The article was co-authored by Drs. Sigal Barsade, professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Olivia O’Neill, assistant professor at George Mason...