Blog

By Marisa G. Franco, Illustration: Ben Hickey, The Atlantic, August 25, 2022 F or many of us, making friends as an adult is intimidating, and sometimes embarrassing or a bit baffling. But we all know those people who appear to be naturals: They balance bustling social calendars, glide easily into conversations with strangers, and seem to get invited to everybody’s wedding. Research shows that these super friends, as I like to call them, really exist: Not only are they better at initiating...

By Nancy Marie Spears and Farrah Mina, Photo: Nick Oxford, The Imprint, August 29, 2022 T he questions now being asked of American Indian survivors of boarding schools, foster care and adoption are expansive. They may require deep introspection. And they might hurt to answer: “Would you say that you have experienced intergenerational trauma? “What are the races of people in the foster family that you lived with for the longest time?” “How often did your parent show affection, such as by...

Are you ready to transform your school to become a trauma-informed and healing-centered environment? An institute specifically tailored for school leaders and leadership teams who want to understand the HOW of trauma-informed schools. Join us for an encore of PACEs Connection Trauma-Informed School Leadership Institute. Speakers included current and former building leaders engaged in the work as well as other national experts supporting schools through this transformation process.

Our culture likes to idolize childhood. All imagine it as a time of perfect innocence, of uninterrupted joy. For many of us, however, the reality of childhood was far different. Indeed, in a 2019 study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of 144,000 American adults, it was found that more than 61% had suffered at least one traumatic event in their childhood . These traumas, which psychologists refer to as adverse childhood events (ACE), may include anything from parental...

JOIN US! September event dates are now up for the FREE PACEs Connection Creating Resilient Communities Accelerator Program. if you have already taken the required first event, you'll receive an email with zoom links. If not, save the date for the events you want to join, and take the next Introduction to PACEs Connection webinar ASAP!

how close the Amazon forest is to a tipping point of “savannization” and the consequences of that for the maintenance of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

By Anya Kamenetz, Illustration Monica Garwood/The New York Times, The New York Times, August 22, 2022 A few years ago, people thought American kids had it way too easy. Best-selling books and articles lamented “the coddling of the American mind” and shamed “ snowplow parents ” who removed every obstacle their children encountered. Parents were scolded, told that they should allow their kids to develop “ grit ” by giving them “ the gift of failure .” (If a child leaves their term paper at...

By Matt Richtel, Photo: Annie Flanagan/The New York Times, The New York Times, August 28, 2022 One morning in the fall of 2017, Renae Smith, a high school freshman on Long Island, N.Y., could not get out of bed, overwhelmed at the prospect of going to school. In the following days, her anxiety mounted into despair. “I should have been happy,” she later wrote. “But I cried, screamed and begged the universe or whatever godly power to take away the pain of a thousand men that was trapped inside...

By Scott Simon, Photo: Unsplash, National Public Radio, August 27, 2022 Scott Simon gets an update from Nick Higgins, chief librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library, on the Books Unbanned initiative. It makes e-books and audiobooks available to teens nationwide. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: An update now on a library that is not removing books from circulation - quite the opposite. Since April, the Brooklyn Public Library has been making e-books and audiobooks available to teens around the country for...

By Claire Parker, Photo: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, August 28, 2022 The world will remember the summer of 2022 in the Northern Hemisphere as a season of brutal heat that saw rivers run dry , wildfires rage and farmers struggle to save their crops. Temperatures broke records in Britain , Spain and Portugal , and in East Asia. Thousands of people in Europe have died from the heat, and heat-fueled fires have burned more than a million acres of land across the continent.

By Maya Richard-Craven, Photo: Yarygin/Getty Images/iStockphoto, The Guardian, August 28, 2022 E nter a room and notice the scent of wood. Palo santo, a unique bark that stems from the tropical forest of Ecuador, burns brightly. A statue of a dark-skinned African woman sits in the center, sea shells dangling from her body. A facilitator begins the psychedelic mushroom ceremony with music and prayer. Amanda De Luz, a vice-president of operations at an automotive company by day, is wearing a...

By Frida Berrigan , August 23, 2022, Waging Nonviolence My beach reading stack was less whodunits and guilty pleasures and more of a Climate Change 101 survey course. But in this summer of widespread drought, heatwaves melting roads , super storm events, a deadlocked international climate meeting, the protracted political saga of the senator in Big Coal’s back pocket, and lots of other top-of-the-fold climate catastrophe news, my deep dive was in the service of survival and wide-eyed hope...