Blog

It’s sure been a huge change for everyone, especially Family Home Child Care Providers. So much required for providers due to Covid-19. 50% of providers have closed Temporary or permanently in Solano County. We’ve loss staff and our enrollment is low. But cost in supplies and equipment needed to keep the children and providers safe have increased. Something I’ve been working on is bringing more awareness around the importance of early learning and care. Especially since the government has...

T he world is learning more about the uncommon but puzzling ways Covid-19 can show up in kids, keeping worried parents on the lookout for symptoms of the disease. We should also be concerned about how toxic stress brought on by the pandemic, or made worse by it, will affect children’s developing brains and bodies and their future health. In millions of households, kids are experiencing an incredible amount of stress and anxiety. They’ve lost the stability and safety of schools and day cares,...

Becky Haas and Marlo Nash, co-authors of this article partnered to achieve a two-part goal. The first, to describe a systems-level need for early childhood, child maltreatment prevention and child welfare systems to integrate in response to the COVID pandemic. The second, to build off of the big picture need for change to offer a concrete, practical example for action centered on ensuring early care and education providers are equipped to recognize and respond to trauma in young children,...

Sixty years ago this summer I told. My parents fought to have my perpetrator removed from the organization - to no avail. They were accused of being the ones with the problem because they could not forgive, forget and move on. Thank God, my parents did move on. They left that group. Their belief in me and their sacrificial actions gave me the foundation to thrive. However, the abuse became flesh and dwelt inside me and for decades I suffered great gynecological problems. Recent studies link...

Mytrae Meliana (pronounced “My-thray-yee”) is a holistic psychotherapist, trauma expert, speaker, author, and women's empowerment and spiritual teacher. She mentors women to heal from trauma, detox from patriarchy, and claim their truth, power, heart, and purpose.

By Carolyn Jones, EdSource, August 6, 2020 When Amistad continuation high school closed its campus in March due to the pandemic, the staff went into overdrive to stay in touch with students. They called all 205. If a student’s phone was disconnected, they went to the student’s house. If no one answered, they asked neighbors. “The effort was relentless,” said David Gustafson, principal of the public school in Indio, near Palm Springs, that serves students who’ve been expelled or are at risk...

By Brentin Mock, Bloomberg CityLab, August 6, 2020 A group of several hundred urban planners is calling for the largest U.S. planning organization to support defunding the police. While this kind of reform may seem in the purview of criminal justice policymakers, the planners lay out in a letter to the American Planning Association how neighborhoods that were racially segregated by a range of planning policies have become further denigrated by police violence and harassment of Black people —...

By Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic, September 2020 Marine One waited for the president of the United States on the South Lawn of the White House. It was July 30, 2019, not long past 9 a.m. Donald Trump was headed to historic Jamestown to mark the 400th anniversary of the first representative assembly of European settlers in the Americas. But Black Virginia legislators were boycotting the visit. Over the preceding two weeks, the president had been engaged in one of the most racist political...

By Alden Woods, ProPublica, August 9, 2020 A couple of months after Kimasha Shorty’s son started sixth grade at an Arizona public middle school, his teachers called her at home. He had trouble adding and subtracting and was struggling to read at grade level. Shorty didn’t understand how it was possible that her oldest child could be so far behind after leaving Wide Ruins Community School , the sole elementary school in an area of about 1,000 residents at the southern edge of the Navajo...

Last Friday I went live on air on Dave Congalton's Hometown Radio, local to San Luis Obispo, CA to discuss ACEs, Mary Trump's new book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man about the Trump family legacy of trauma, and ACEs Connection's Jane Stevens' latest article . I received the full spectrum of live callers: folks who were happy to better understand their own childhood trauma as well as those who staunchly defended Trump's family values. Listen to...

From The Office of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, August 5, 2020 Today Governor Gretchen took action to elevate Black voices in state government, signing Executive Order 2020-163, which creates the Black Leadership Advisory Council. The governor also signed Executive Directive 2020-9, recognizing racism as a public health crisis and taking initial steps to address it within state government. Under the Executive Directive, the governor asked MDHHS to make health equity a major goal, as well as...

When I first learned about ACEs science, I was working for the local police department as the Director of a crime prevention program. This program was aimed at reducing drug related and violent crime by strengthening community partnerships. Our efforts yielded 19 crime prevention programs implemented by 35 community agencies. Together we reduced crime by 40% in one neighborhood, and pioneered a first probation program of its kind in Tennessee to reduce recidivism. At the end of the grant in...