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Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts lower-income communities, communities of color, and persons with disabilities, creating a barrier to achieving health equity. People who are incarcerated face greater chances for chronic health conditions, both while confined and long after their release. Incarceration exposes people to a wide range of conditions, such as poor sanitation and ventilation and solitary confinement, that are detrimental to long-term physical and mental health. After...

Community Resilience Initiative is officially launching a new series of blog posts, building to our 2019 Beyond Paper Tigers conference on June 25th - 27th. We’ll cover a range of topics relevant to conference material, events, and inspirations. In addition to the regular conference, CRI is offering two training add-on options on Tuesday June 25, 2019 prior to the conference: Resilience-Based Trainings, Course One and Two . https://criresilient.org/beyon...re-conference-event/ “A group of...

Sitting on my bookshelf in my office is a framed copy of Time Magazine from April 14, 1997. On the cover is a picture of Ellen DeGeneres with the headline “Yep, I’m Gay,” When President Obama awarded Ellen the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2016, he said “It’s easy to forget now just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages 20 years ago.”

The US is home to nearly one out of every four prisoners in the world. There are 2.1 million prisoners in the US, including 1.2 million people incarcerated in state prisons. Nearly 180,000 are behind federal prison bars, and 704,500 are in local jails. The number of US prisoners serving life sentences is four times of what it was in 1984 . In light of a system that is not only immoral and unethical, but also ineffective and unsustainable, these circumstances cry out for decarceration. One...

Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor started the podcast Ear Hustle when Woods was a prisoner in San Quentin. Woods' sentence was recently commuted, but the two continue to tell stories of life behind bars. GROSS: That's the sound of the San Quentin prison door slamming as my guest Earlonne Woods was released in late November after being incarcerated there for seven years. The sound was recorded because he's the co-host and co-producer of the podcast Ear Hustle, which features interviews with San...

I’m a sleep lover. I like going to bed at the same time every night and getting a full night’s sleep. Deprive me of just one hour of blessed sleep, and things quickly go downhill—just ask my husband. I become bad company—snarky and irritable, hardly able to keep up my end of a conversation, let alone negotiate difficult issues. Sleep is clearly important for our health, helping our bodies function at their best. It’s also key to our productivity, helping us stay fresh and focused the...

The US Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, the NY Foundling Institute, the American Professional Society of Abuse of Children, StopSpanking.org , and you are forming #AMillionVoicesToEndHitting. As a collective voice, we can be heard. Let's address ACEs upstream by intervening to prevent violence, raise awareness of the harm of spanking and promote peaceful parenting!

In this new animated video, meet “Dr. Cruz,” who addresses these questions and shares what she has learned about caring for patients with exposure to trauma, including abuse, neglect, and violence.

The 3rd Annual Philadelphia Trauma Training Conference: Promoting Equitable Access to High Quality Services for Vulnerable Children and Families , will be held on Thomas Jefferson University's East Falls Philadelphia Campus July 29 th -August 1st, 2019 . This unique training conference will provide an intensive, collaborative, and engaging experience to providers, educators, and leaders across health, education, and social service disciplines, as well as to community members invested in...

This story was produced in collaboration with the Hechinger Report . When Matt Jackson's girlfriend was killed in gang crossfire in 2014, leaving him a single father to a three-year-old girl, he knew it was time to do something different with his life.* Jackson, who grew up surrounded by drugs and violence in Boston's South End neighborhood, had been getting into trouble since he was a kid. Locked up at 14 for possessing crack cocaine, he spent what might have been his college years in...

If we were to guess why so-called “elites” are so disliked by others, we might suggest that we look to the habit of defining the reality of others and making neat little rationalization packages that insult the protagonists, then creating prescriptions for their betterment, thank you very much. The comfortable do-gooder creates stories about why things are the way they are, and then decides that one or another intervention will be just the thing to turn the situation around. A book (or...

A healthy, engaged community depends on people achieving to the best of their potential, contributing actively to the economy and public well-being, and helping the next generation to thrive. A complex set of intertwined social and biological factors influences people’s motivation to participate actively and productively in schools, jobs, and communities–and to persevere in the face of setbacks. To unlock this puzzle and ensure that all people have the opportunity to develop motivation to...