Blog

Last Wednesday, March 13th, I had the opportunity to present a Legislative Lunch and Learn to legislators, legislative staff, administrative staff, and the public in the Alaska State Capitol Building. To a room of ~ 30 - 40 people munching on lunch provided by the Alaska Children's Trust , and broadcast live via Gavel to Gavel (now archived here ), I had the honor to premiere the policymaker version of our History and Hope curriculum. This curriculum, and the policy-maker version, was...

Dear ACEs Connection Members: We are pleased to offer all ACEs Connection members the opportunity to watch Broken Places and to discuss the film and how screenings can help communities gather, start and grow on Twitter tomorrow night. So far, thousands of people have registered, and we are excited about this virtual screening and Twitter event. If you haven't registered yet, and would like to do so, there are only a few hours left to do so. Registration deadline: today, March 20th, at 12...

Particularly we who passed through ACE’s have difficulty with our feelings. In this article we explore how to feel, and how to feel better. Our example is how one individual turned the label “cancer” into a liberating experience. I know this sounds illogical, but you choose and want to feel however you feel. Whether you feel overjoyed at news you were looking forward to, or grief, loneliness or even agonizing despair, you are creating the situation the causes you to feel those emotions. The...

Elaine Miller-Karas, executive director and co-founder of the Trauma Resource Institute, has been invited to attend the launch in New Delhi, India, of a special program initiated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Miller-Karas is one of the key developers of the Trauma Resiliency Model® (TRM) and the Community Resiliency Model® (CRM) – biological-based models designed to help people recover from toxic stress. Miller-Karas has shepherded the Trauma Resource Institute since its birth in 2006 into...

Ivanka Trump has waded into the child care debate again with vocal support for a proposed one-time influx of $1 billion to the federal Child Care Development Fund, which provides states with money for subsidizing care. The money, which is listed in addition to the $5.3 billion for child care also included in the White House’s proposed budget, would be available to states willing to compete for it in part by eliminating requirements or regulations that can make it harder to run child care...

As head of New York City's correctional health services, Dr. Homer Venters spent nine years overseeing the care of thousands of inmates in the jails on Rikers Island. Though he left Rikers in 2017, what he witnessed on the job has stayed with him. "What's important to consider about jail settings is that they are incredibly dehumanizing, and they dehumanize the individuals who pass through them," Venters says. "There is not really a true respect for the rights of the detained." Venters is...

An oft-told urban success story is that of Medellín, Colombia. Under Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord that inspired the Netflix show Narcos, the city was one of the most violent places on Earth in the 1980s and early '90s. And then it became one of the most innovative —a " model city ." The reasons for that transformation are complicated. But one key driver was the local government's focus on changing the socio-cultural narrative, which gave rise to the concept of cultura ciudadana or...

Over the past 30 years I have worked in and created nearly a dozen addiction, co-occurring disorder, and mental health hospitals, intensive outpatient programs, and residential treatment centers around the US and overseas. And guess what? Over the years I’ve seen a lot of things that bother me. Here’s a quick sample of what’s gone wrong over the last few decades in addiction healthcare. (And I’m sure that many of you have your own thoughts to add.) Extraordinary treatment programs have...

“T he average age of a gunshot victim in Chicago is about 27 years old. Everybody thinks it’s younger , and that means that gun violence prevention efforts are not nearly as targeted and effective as they could be.” Sociology professor Andrew Papachristos has been interested in criminal justice ever since childhood, when his Greek immigrant parents were the victims of gang violence on Chicago’s North Side. Now, his research applies public health concepts and network science to map gun...

To many people, prejudice seems to be rising in American society. In 2009, around a quarter of Americans identified racism as a “big problem.” By 2015, that number had doubled. Since then, we’ve seen a measurable jump in reported hate crimes. Today, six in ten Americans believe gay and lesbian people face a lot of discrimination . But research by Harvard psychologists Tessa Charlesworth and Mahzarin Banaji suggests a paradox: Even as Americans grow more aware of bias, we appear to be...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday adopted a strict interpretation of a federal immigration law, saying it required the detention of immigrants facing deportation without the possibility of bail if they had committed crimes, including minor ones, no matter how long ago they had been released from criminal custody. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s more conservative justices in the majority. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the plain language of a federal...

In 2015, Dr. Beth Pletcher, a pediatrician and associate professor specializing in genetics, was at the annual conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Washington D.C. when she heard two speakers that forever changed her work with medical students. Dr. Beth Pletcher “I went to two talks on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that were so mind-boggling to me that I decided on my drive back to New Jersey that I had to do something about it,”says Pletcher, director of the Division...