Tagged With "Immigration Initiative at Harvard"
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A cheaper, quicker approach to social-emotional learning? [hechingerreport.org]
One of the biggest educational trends of the past decade is social-emotional learning. Experts quibble over what these soft skills are exactly but the term generally refers to things like managing emotions, learning to set goals and getting along with others. Programs to boost these skills have proliferated at schools. Some are sold by curriculum publishers and cost many thousands of dollars. Others are free but can still involve hundreds of hours of teacher training. Many of the programs...
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ACEs/toxic stress color wheel for schools!
If you've seen the documentary Paper Tigers , you may remember the stress target -- or color wheel -- in Lincoln High School Principal Jim Sporleder's office. Now you can have one, too! The steering group members of the Yolo Resilience Network in Yolo County, CA, (you can find them on the Yolo County ACEs Connection group) realized the needed to have some tools that they could give to local educators for whom they did presentations about ACEs and trauma-informed practices. "We'd see people...
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African-American students with disabilities suspended at disproportionately high rates [edsource.org]
African-American special education students nationwide lose substantially more instruction time due to discipline than their white counterparts, according to a report by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard University. The report , “Disabling Punishment: The Need for Remedies to the Disparate Loss of Instruction Experienced by Black Students with Disabilities,” extrapolated its findings from federal data from 2014-15 and...
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Animated videos help teachers build sense of empathy in students [EdSource.org]
A Silicon Valley educational technology company and researchers from Harvard have teamed up to launch a new series of animated videos next month about the importance of empathy , intended for teachers to use in building students’ social and emotional skills. Developed by ClassDojo’s Big Ideas program and researchers at the Making Caring Common project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, the series of three short videos, called “Empathy,” are the latest manifestation of a push to move...
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Animated videos help teachers build sense of empathy in students [EdSource.org]
A Silicon Valley educational technology company and researchers from Harvard have teamed up to launch a new series of animated videos next month about the importance of empathy , intended for teachers to use in building students’ social and emotional skills. Developed by ClassDojo’s Big Ideas program and researchers at the Making Caring Common project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, the series of three short videos, called “Empathy,” are the latest manifestation of a push to move...
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Plymouth County Schools Receiving Trauma Informed Training
This opportunity is for schools and districts to receive training to develop an awareness of the prevalence of traumatic experience, its impact on academic behavior and relations and the need for a whole school approach. For the 2019-2020 school year, Carver, Marshfield, Rockland, Scituate and Silver Lake qualified to receive free training from TLPI.
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COACHING is recommended by the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University
Coaching helps people tap into their potential, unlocking sources of creativity and productivity.” Positive results in the areas of “improved communication, increased self-esteem/self-confidence, increased productivity, optimized individual and team performance ”
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Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
School safety, negligence documentation, and a need for a school reform My name is Natalia Garceau. For nine years, I’ve been working at a center similar to the one where Nikolas Cruz was sent to after his expulsion from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. You won’t hear anything from the teachers who work at such centers because they are afraid to lose their jobs and to be taken to court. They have families to feed. By contract, we are not allowed to speak with media about anything...
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Discipline bill is well intentioned, but doesn't meet needs of students, parents or teachers [VtDigger.org]
This commentary is by Alyssa Chen, a career educator who recently made the transition to education advocate and community organizer. Over the past two years, Vermont Legal Aid has brought much-needed attention to the issue of disproportionate suspension, the practice by which certain students get suspended at rates exceeding those of others. Legal Aid formed the Dignity in Schools Coalition to fight for statewide policy change. Bolstered by the findings of the Kicked Out Report (January...
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Engaging Parents, Developing Leaders
A Self-Assessment and Planning Tool for Nonprofits and Schools By the Annie E. Casey Foundation This publication introduces an assessment and planning tool to help nonprofits evaluate their parent engagement efforts and chart a path toward deeper partnerships with parents and caregivers. The tool spans just eight pages, with accompanying text outlining how to use it, how to assess its results and what real-world strategies and programs are already in play — and working — to boost parent...
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Exercise: An Antidote for Behavioral Issues in Students? [Consumer.Healthday.com]
Children with serious behavioral disorders might fare better at school if they get some exercise during the day, a new study suggests. The researchers focused on children and teenagers with conditions that included autism spectrum disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety and depression. They looked at whether structured exercise during the school day -- in the form of stationary "cybercycles" -- could help ease students' behavioral issues in the classroom. Over a...
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“Handle with Care” ~ West Virginia (WV) Center for Children’s Justice & WV State Police
The West Virginia Defending Childhood Initiative, commonly referred to as Handle With Care, is tailored to reflect the needs and issues affecting children in West Virginia. The Initiative, a result of a collaborative effort of key stakeholders and partners, builds upon the success of proven programs throughout the country. The goal of the Initiative is to prevent children's exposure to trauma and violence, mitigate negative affects experienced by children's exposure to trauma, and to...
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How Facial Expressions of Adults Affect Children
Karen Murphy, who is principal at Free Orchards Elementary School where I work, is a champion of trauma awareness and is working hard to lead our school in the direction of trauma sensitive practices -and away from the policies & procedures that have historically made well-intentioned school districts part of the "pipeline to prison". One of her sayings is "fix yer face", which means simply to put a warm expression on your face, consciously and regularly.
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How Making Kindness a Priority Benefits Students (ww2.kqed.org)
In a 2014 Harvard study of 10,000 middle and high school kids, 80 percent of the students said they value achievement and happiness over caring for others. While 96 percent of parents report that they want above all for their children to be caring, 81 percent of kids said they believe their parents value achievement and happiness more. A similar math holds for students and teachers: 62 percent of kids believe their teachers prize academic success above all. And this thinking affects student...
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How Making Time for Mindfulness Helps Students (kqed.org)
A new study suggests that mindfulness education — lessons on techniques to calm the mind and body — can reduce the negative effects of stress and increase students’ ability to stay engaged, helping them stay on track academically and avoid behavior problems. After finding that students who self-reported mindful habits performed better on tests and had higher grades, researchers with the Boston Charter Research Collaborative — a partnership between the Center for Education Policy Research at...
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How to Design a School That Prioritizes Kindness and Caring (kqed.org)
Countless schools across the nation strive to make character a feature of education. Whether through classes on social-emotional learning , mindfulness exercises or reminders about the virtues of gratitude, thousands of students are exposed to messages that deplore cheating and bullying and celebrate kindness and consideration. In spite of the lecturing, however, 51 percent of high school kids owned up to cheating on exams, according to the Josephson Institute. Another 62 percent believe...
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How to Teach Teens About Love, Consent and Emotional Intelligence (ww2.kqed.org)
Navigating love and relationships can be difficult at any age, but especially so in the angsty teenage years. Budding romances can be fun and exhilarating but also confusing and uncomfortable. In these moments of confusion, teens often turn to friends or the internet for advice. But what if teens were trained with other options? What if lessons in love and romance were taught more explicitly in schools and at home? It turns out that teens are yearning for these lessons. They’re looking for...
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Incorporating Trauma Informed Practice and ACEs into Professional Curricula - a Toolkit
The toolkit is designed to aid faculty and teachers in a variety of disciplines, specifically social work, medicine, law, education, and counseling, to develop or integrate critical content on adverse childhood experiences and trauma informed care into new or existing curricula of graduate education programs. This toolkit provides an overview of colleges and universities that have courses in trauma-informed practice and ACEs science. Most of the toolkit comprises content for a course on...
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Setting the Wheels in Motion - Becoming a Trauma Informed and Trauma Sensitive School
I recently wrote a blog post about how to take the first step in creating a trauma informed care model (TIC) in your school. The first step, Establishing a Baseline, is necessary because it fuels future steps in the process. In the blog post "Is Your School Ready to be Trauma Informed and Trauma Sensitive," I also listed the key components of a TIC model. I am adding them here as well, because I don't want you to have to keep going back to the other blog as you are working on this process.
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Some 350 Florida Leaders Expected to Attend Think Tank with Dr. Vincent Felitti, Co-Principal Investigator of the ACE Study; Expert on ACEs Science
Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...
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The 74 Interview: Harvard’s Karen Mapp on ESSA, Family Engagement, and How Schools and Communities Can Partner to Help Kids Succeed (the74million.org)
The Every Student Succeeds Act contains a subtle difference from previous legislation when it comes to connecting families with schools: The phrase “parental involvement” has been changed to “family engagement.” Subtle, but important, said Karen Mapp, who pushed for this change during her time as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Education in 2013, as ESSA was being crafted. Now a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Mapp said she’ll never forget an encounter...
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The Art of Control ACTIVITIES AND RESOURCES TO ENHANCE EXECUTIVE FUNCTION IN YOUNG CHILDREN
Executive function — our ability to remember and use what we know, defeat our unproductive impulses, and switch gears and adjust to new demands — is increasingly understood as a key element not just of learning but of lifelong...
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The Brain Science Is In: Students' Emotional Needs Matter (edweek.org)
Teachers, like parents, have always understood that children’s learning and growth do not occur in a vacuum, but instead at the messy intersection of academic, social, and emotional development. And they know that students’ learning is helped (or hindered) by the quality of students’ relationships and the contexts in which they live and learn. Working to weave those threads, skilled teachers often have yearned for schools—and policy approaches—that understand this complex reality. Such...
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The Center on the Developing Child - Harvard University
Website: The Center on the Developing Child - Harvard University Info: The Center on the Developing Child’s diverse activities align around building an R&D (research and development) platform for science-based innovation, and transforming the policy and practice landscape that supports and even demands change. We do this because society pays a huge price when children do not reach their potential, because half a century of policies and programs have not produced breakthrough outcomes,...
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Mental Health Programs in Schools – Growing Body of Evidence Supports Effectiveness [SocialWorkHelper.com]
School-based mental health programs can reach large numbers of children, with increasing evidence of effectiveness in improving mental health and related outcomes, according to a research review in the September/October issue of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry . The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer . “ This review provides evidence that large-scale, school-based programs can be implemented in a variety of diverse cultures and educational models as well as preliminary evidence that...
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Mentorship program aims to boost graduation rates and cut crime (mercedsunstar.com)
A collaborative Merced County program is using mentoring in an effort to improve high school graduation rates and decrease crime. Through Project 10%, UC Merced students visit county middle school classrooms to motivate students to graduate from high school and pursue higher education. The UC Merced volunteers share their stories with eighth-grade students about their journeys to the university. The UC students send the message that the younger students can survive their situations and move...
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Back to School but Nothing's Normal. Schools Mobilize to Help Children of Immigrants After Traumatic Summer [laschoolreport.com]
By Conor P. Williams and Rosario Quiroz Villareal, LA School Report, September 16, 2019 It was a busy, if often frustrating, summer for the Trump administration’s many efforts to destabilize U.S. immigration policies. Federal judges ruled in August that, under a longstanding legal agreement, the administration was required to provide detained children at the border with “edible food, clean water, soap and toothpaste.” So the administration announced that it would write new regulations to...
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Can Love Close the Achievement Gap? [TheAtlantic.com]
Seat-belt use in the United States rose from 14 percent in 1985 to 84 percent in 2011 thanks, in large part, to a massive ad campaign promoting the practice. Even now, with “buckle up” warnings far less prominent, seat-belt use continues to rise . Ronald Ferguson wants to see a similar trend with the use of five evidence-based parenting principles dubbed the Boston Basics : maximize love, manage stress; talk, sing, and point; count, group, and compare; explore through movement and play; and...
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‘Change in culture’: New California guidelines aim to help teach social, emotional skills [Press Democrat]
The nation’s schools long ago broadened their missions beyond the teaching of academic subjects and participation in extracurricular activities. Educators have for decades been entrusted to teach students a wider range of life skills, including those that touch on emotions, empathy and relationships with other people. Now, a new state guide , released Wednesday, offers a slew of resources for teachers and administrators seeking to bolster kids’ social and emotional development. “Science...
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Learning Through Play [TheAtlantic.com]
Google the definition of play and the first thing that pops up is this: “[To] engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.” Jack Shonkoff, the director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, finds that language supremely frustrating. “It’s not taking a break from learning when we talk about play,” he told me, rattling off a litany of cognitive, physical, mental, and social-emotional benefits. “Play is one of the most...
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The Learning Curve: 'Restorative Justice' Can Make Schools More Violent If Not Done Right [VoiceOfSanDiego.org]
In 2014, a team of Harvard researchers visited San Diego Unified and produced a report that convinced school district administrators their punitive, zero-tolerance policies weren’t working. According to the researchers, a disproportionate number of suspensions and expulsions had involved students of color and those with disabilities. Students repeatedly suspended from school were more likely to drop out of school or be involved with the criminal justice system. [For more of this story,...
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The powerful message of resilience by new Harvard grad, Donovan Livingston
It was powerful, I watched the five minute speech 6 times in a row. There is just so much to it- it's like he wrote a dissertation and a manifesto and somehow managed to tuck it all into a 5 minute spoken word poem! Talent, to say the least!
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The Real Crisis in Education: An Open Letter to the Department of Education by Krista Taylor
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue, SW Washington, D.C. 20202 Governor John Kasich Riffe Center, 30th Floor 77 South High Street Columbus, OH 43215-6117 Superintendent of Public Instruction Paolo DeMaria Ohio Department of Education 25 South Front Street Columbus, OH 43215-4183 Dear Secretary DeVos, Governor Kasich, and Superintendent DeMaria: I write to each of you, in my position as a teacher in the Cincinnati Public Schools, to ask for...
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The urgent need for a system of support for California schools (edsource.org)
Earlier this year, a representative of a California advocacy and civil-rights organization asked me if the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence , the new state agency that I head, has a “genuine sense of urgency” about its work in getting the right kind of help and assistance to districts, charters and county offices of education. I told him that the very first meeting that we had in the very first district that we agreed to take on was at Ironwood State Prison, which is...
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The Utter Inadequacy of America’s Efforts to Desegregate Schools [theatlantic.com]
My best friend in kindergarten, Eddie Linton, did not live in one of the spacious houses on the hill in the Boston suburb where I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, Belmont, which is best known for its stellar schools and abundance of Harvard professors. Eddie, who is black, lived instead in a brownstone in the South End of Boston, alongside his two American-born sisters, plus grandparents and aunts and godparents from Barbados, the country where his parents were born. Every morning, Eddie...
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Regulating the Teenage Mind: ACTIVITIES TO HELP TEENS SET GOALS, STAY ORGANIZED, AND KEEP THEMSELVES ON TRACK
Teenagers don’t yet possess the executive function skills of adults, but they probably need those skills just as much as adults do, or more. They have to manage the increasingly complex demands and fast-flying deadlines of school...
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Resource List - Activities & Tools
This is a list of activities and tools for children K-12. If you recommend any others besides those listed here, please leave a comment in this blog post with a link and/or information.
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Resource List - Tutorials (Online)
Online tutorials about adverse childhood experience, neurobiology of toxic stress and how children's learning is affected by trauma. If you recommend any others besides those listed here, please leave a comment in this blog post with a link and/or information.
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School Discipline Linked to Later Consequences
Published in Usable Knowledge from Harvard Graduate School of Education RESEARCH STORIES School Discipline Linked to Later Consequences Study finds clear and long-lasting negative effects for students attending high-suspension schools — particularly minority boys BY: Emily Boudreau POSTED: September 16, 2019 Since the emergence of zero tolerance discipline policies in the 1990s, schools have increasingly been relying on suspensions as a behavioral management tactic. However, these policies...
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Toxic Stress: Issue Brief on Family Separation and Child Detention [immigrationinitiative.harvard.edu]
By Jack P. Shonkoff, Immigration Initiative at Harvard, October 2019 Background The separation of children from their parents and their prolonged detention for an indefinite period of time raise profound concerns that transcend partisan politics and demand immediate resolution. Forcibly separating children from their parents is like setting a house on fire. Preventing rapid reunification is like blocking the first responders from doing their job. And subjecting children to prolonged...
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Trauma education and mindfulness help youth living amid gun violence
Armon Hurst, 2nd from left, first row, Teens on Target, courtesy of YouthAlive! Eighteen-year-old Armon Hurst serves as vice president of the student body at Castlemont High School in Oakland, Calif. He has a 4.0 grade point average, is an avid baseball player, and is slated to go to college next year. But until a few years ago, Hurst would find himself waking from nightmares in the middle of the night. It was difficult to concentrate at school, and he wasn’t eating well. Armon Hurst “There...
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Trauma is Messy
I will always remember the day that, as a student teacher, I watched as a student entered my second-grade room covered in blood. After quickly establishing that he was not injured, we learned that the blood was that of his brother who had been shot the night before. No parents were around that night, so this second grader became the sole caregiver of his bleeding brother. My student would never be the same. We didn’t care about grades or test scores. We just knew that this moment would...
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Understanding Trauma's Impact on Learning: A pathway to creating a school culture where every child living through adversity can grow alongside peers [my.aasa.org]
Susan Cole, director of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative at Harvard Law School and Massachusetts Advocates for Children, believes the most effective school settings weave trauma sensitivity into other affairs of the school day. The principal of a small elementary school in central Massachusetts was approached by his staff with a request. They asked about their school becoming more responsive to trauma owing to the number of children in their classrooms who seemed to be facing...
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What If All Children Could Attend Preschool? [RWJF.org]
For the past 18 years, every 4-year-old in Oklahoma has been guaranteed a spot in preschool, for free. These kids are learning their letters, numbers, colors and shapes. They’re also developing arguably more important social and emotional tools--how to make friends, feel empathy, solve problems, manage conflict. These are the kind of building blocks children need to become thriving adults . Nearly 75 percent of 4-year-olds are enrolled in Oklahoma’s pre-K program. That's one of the highest...
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White House convenes federal, state, and local leaders to address trauma-informed approaches in schools
With just four months remaining in the Obama presidency, the White House assembled leaders from 14 states and the District of Columbia and key administration officials for a day-long conference, “ Trauma Informed Approaches in Schools: Supporting Girls of Color and Rethinking Discipline.” Last summer’s White House meeting, titled “Rethink School Discipline,” covered issues related to the CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study and trauma, but transforming schools through trauma-informed approaches...
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Why Mandating Mental Health Education in Schools is a Band-Aid on a Gaping Wound
Don’t get me wrong: of course I care deeply about the mental and physical health of children, including my own son’s. I don’t want students to suffer in silence and shame. But I am very concerned about just how this topic will be taught in schools.
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Re: Trauma is Messy
As a teacher, keep in mind the great potential role of Theatre as enabling people to speak about the unspeakable: "Hey, I'm not talking about me! We're talking about what's up there on the stage." So, what if you were to ask a class if they've ever written a play. No? "So let's write a play today. Let's write a play, Hmm, let's write a play about someone who's growing up in a house where someone's getting hurt. What's his or her name? And where's the house: In town or out in the country? And...
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Re: Trauma is Messy
Thank you, Jon. This article is so inspiring. I am sharing it as widely as I can on social media and sending it to teacher friends who are so desperate to help their kids succeed. I love how you have let the students work, as best you can, at their own pace and space. Kids are rushed so much, and every experience of being rushed is a little reminder that they aren't fast enough; good enough. Allowing choices takes a little pressure off. A little pressure relief in the form of movement from...
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The Traumatic Impact of Racism on Young People and How to Talk About It [Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg]
Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg (Keynote speaker from the recent Creating a Resilient Community Conference) shared the excerpt from his book Reaching Teens titled The Traumatic Impact of Racism on Young People and How to Talk About It. This is a valuable resource for anyone interacting with youth and we are providing the excerpt as an attachment here for you to read and share. Also, Dr. Ginsburg will be coming back to our community (virtually) and you’ll be invited to his workshop. Look out for the...
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Empowering Resilience to ACEs
The 16 Strong Project is dedicated to empowering resilience to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) through educational workshops, school partnerships, and community outreach. 16 Strong strives to continue conversations that help young people recognize and navigate the challenges they are facing as a result of ACEs. We believe that with strong support systems, healthy coping mechanisms and a positive mindset, the negative impacts of ACEs can be mitigated.