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By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde, Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2020 Los Angeles will offer a one-time $800 stipend to employees who work in food service industries, including restaurants, breweries and food stands, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday. The Secure Emergency Relief for Vulnerable Employees, or SERVE, initiative will give 4,000 workers the cash using money from the nonprofit Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, Garcetti said in an evening briefing. The news comes as the number of...

ACEs Aware Grant Opportunity to Support Trauma-Informed Networks of Care Informational Webinar The informational webinar will be held on December 11, 2020, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Potential applicants are encouraged to submit questions for the webinar via email to info@acesaware.org by Noon on December 7, 2020 . The subject line of the email should read “Network of Care Informational Webinar.” Mark your calendar and join this Zoom link on webinar day. More information about the RFP and the...

Art and Trauma: Creativity As a Resiliency & Healing Factor I have long believed that all of the creative arts are healing. I was drawn to music because it made me feel good, first just listening, then learning to play the drums and then performing in rock bands. Later in life, learning the guitar and singing along with songwriting. Sadly, trauma disconnects so many of us from our creative outlets...finding the ways to reconnect with our creative selves goes a long ways in healing the...

Chloe Yang, 12/3/20, positiveexperience.org/blog Last week, in anticipation of an unprecedented Thanksgiving experience, we published a special holiday blog post . The post was composed of crowdsourced stories, featuring individuals’ efforts to safely create positive experiences during a socially distanced time. Our first story came from Dianna Shaw, a Meals on Wheels volunteer driver in suburban Rhode Island. To recap, Dianna realized she would be the last or only person the seniors on her...

Link to event: https://www.facebook.com/events/170794351383725/?sfnsn=mo

Just how stressed are teachers? A recent Gallup poll found teachers are tied with nurses for the most stressful occupation in America today. Unfortunately, that stress can have a trickle-down effect on their students, leading to disruptive behavior that results in student suspensions. One of those overburdened teachers is Jennifer Lloyd, a high school English teacher in Maryland and a graduate student at the University of Missouri. She has noticed how perceptive her students are to her mood...

It was Pete Walker, an M.A. in psychoanalysis, who first coined the phrase emotional flashback to describe the gut-wrenching experience of reliving the helplessness and dissociation caused by trauma. In his book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving , Walker describes many aspects of emotional flashbacks and how the inner critic holds people hostage. I shall be referencing this book throughout this work. In this piece, we shall examine how the inner critic and toxic shame create the...

By Steven Yoder, The Imprint, November 22, 2020 A dozen years ago , New York state revealed that taxpayers were shelling out $140,000 to $200,000 each year to house each young person in the state’s juvenile facilities. Many of these supervised residential centers and deeply troubled youth prisons lined with razor wire and high-security locked gates were less than half full. The state’s Office of Children and Family Services described in a 2008 report with a cover showing rows of empty beds,...

By Jim Morrison, The Washington Post, November 24, 2020 For 10,000 years, the Swinomish tribe has fished the waters of northwestern Washington, relying on the bounty of salmon and shellfish not only as a staple of its diet but as a centerpiece of its culture. At the beginning of the fishing season, the tribe gathers on the beach for a First Salmon ceremony, a feast honoring the return of the migratory fish that binds the generations of a tribe that calls itself the People of the Salmon. At...

1.0 Continuing Medical Education/Maintenance of Certification Credit Available* The ACEs Aware December webinar, “Supporting Patients in Pregnancy: ACEs and Maternal Health” is now available to watch at ACEsAware.org . Providers seeking CME/MOC credits* must complete a separate activity evaluation in order to request CME/CE certificate. Those seeking MOC credits must also successfully complete the post-test with a score of 75% and higher. Please follow CME/MOC instructions available on...

By Deke Farrow, The Modesto Bee, November 28, 2020 Preston Lee and Melissa Mullings, both juniors at Gregori High School, had similar experiences when the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to begin distance learning. Logging into school to study from home just wasn’t working for them. Easily distracted and lacking the structure of a traditional school day, they pretty much gave up on learning and saw their grades plummet, they said in phone interviews last week. Early on, Melissa realized...

By Nathan McCall, The New York Times, November 23, 2020 Decades ago, when I was a teenager growing up in Portsmouth, Va., my buddies and I constantly railed against the evils of “the system.” We viewed the system as a vast, amorphous establishment that worked to preserve White privilege and control Black folks’ lives. It was the 1970s, and as proof that our hatred of the White mainstream was justified, we had to look no further than our homes. We saw that our parents were beaten down,...