Blog

By Patsy Carter & Andrea Blanch, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2019. It’s no secret that our health, education, and social service systems are failing the people they intend to serve. The US infant mortality rate is higher than in most developed countries, and the gap is widening. American children’s educational performance ranks very low in comparison with the 35 other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The United States incarcerates...

By Richard Florida, CityLab, July 9, 2019. One of the most troubling trends of the past decade is the deepening geographic inequality across the U.S., especially through the clustering of particular types of talent in coastal cities like San Francisco and New York. But a growing chorus of economists and urbanists suggest that we may be seeing the “rise of the rest,” a result of both increasingly unaffordable housing in established hubs and the improvement of the economies in less-established...

By Freya Lucas, The Sector, July 1, 2019. The likelihood of flourishing – that is, doing well in life despite adversity – is true for children across all levels of household income, health status and exposure to adverse childhood experiences. The findings, published in the May issue of Health Affairs , suggest that more emphasis should be placed on programs to promote family resilience and parent-child connection, in conjunction with continued efforts to lessen children’s negative childhood...

By Shree Walker, eSchool News, July 8, 2019. When trauma goes unacknowledged by caring adults, students can feel suffocated by the burden of their experience. Research shows that traumatic experiences can drastically hinder students’ academic development, and that “children who have three or more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are three times more likely to experience academic failure, five times more likely to have attendance problems, and six times more likely to have behavioral...

By Soulaima Gourani, Forbes, July 7, 2019. The worst wounds are not the ones we see on the surface, but the ones that lay deep within us. Many of us like to believe that adversity is healthy and can lead to success, and although many success stories have emerged from hardship, the fact of the matter is that it is rare. According to Dr. Jim Taylor, author of five parenting books, including Your Children Are Listening, "hardships that are brutal and intense, prolonged and uncontrollable don't...

“I’m scared of what the future holds, of getting old. I don’t have a family, and once I retire, I won’t have anything to distract me from the fact that I’m alone in this world.” I wasn’t sure how to respond, because he was telling the truth: that his work is what helps him avoid the painful memories of his past. I could only offer him a tissue, which he already had at his side. Clearly he was more prepared for this interview than I. So I kept filming. After all, it’s what he asked me here to...

Dennis McCollins recounts some of the experiences that caused him to harden against the world as a teenager. “There were times I went to more funerals than birthdays,” says McCollins, who is the clinical director of the School Based Health Center at Greenwood Academy in Richmond, Calif. And it took its toll: “I spent time homeless. I got expelled [from school]. I was so angry and upset and mad,” he says. Dennis McCollins Then a man that he met when he was sent to Job Corps as a teen turned...

As state legislation is trending toward evidence-based models to help reduce the impact ACEs have on their individuals and communities, we are seeing some of the positive impacts that evidence-based therapeutic models can have in demonstrating positive outcomes. A recent documentary produced by Olive Talley, who is an award-winning journalist and producer and previous producer for “Dateline: NBC,” shows the beautiful impact that trauma-informed models can have within the judicial system.

Attached is a Case Statement on Trauma Informed Approaches--it is a review of the Greater Harrisburg Area's and beyond's ACE scores, the outcomes of these ACEs and some ideas of how to resolve the negative consequences of this crisis of epidemic proportions. Please use it to advance the cause of moving from the bad news of ACEs towards the good news of becoming trauma informed and resilient. I would also welcome your comments, questions and recommendations! Thank you.

By Terry Gross, NPR, July 8, 2019. In 2015, Travis Rieder, a medical bioethicist with Johns Hopkins University's Berman Institute of Bioethics , was involved in a motorcycle accident that crushed his left foot. In the months that followed, he underwent six different surgeries as doctors struggled first to save his foot and then to reconstruct it. Rieder says that each surgery brought a new wave of pain, sometimes "searing and electrical," other times "fiery and shocking." Doctors tried to...

By Madeline Will, Education Week, July 5, 2019. HOUSTON — On Independence Day, hundreds of educators marched to a shelter for unaccompanied migrant children, chanting calls for freedom. The protesters are delegates to the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. The NEA is holding its annual representative assembly here July 4-7. But the protest was not sanctioned by the NEA—it was a grassroots march organized by educators, who were horrified to learn their...

By Matt Barnum, ChalkBeat, July 1, 2019. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have catapulted a long-running debate about “busing” and school integration back into the news. Harris’ criticism of fellow Democratic presidential candidate Biden for his vigorous opposition to court-ordered desegregation in the 1970s has also sparked fresh debate about whether those efforts were successful. What do we know? In the most basic sense, they did succeed. School segregation dropped substantially as courts and...