When Marin Community Clinics (MCC) first considered screening their patients for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) they already had decided that if they were going to prevent children from acquiring ACEs, they had to take a radical approach.

Oakland BSC activity: Photo/ Courtesy of Trauma Transformed/East Bay Agency for Children When a group of community organizations in Baltimore came together in 2015, they already knew trauma figured large in many lives. There was violence in the community, in schools, and in community members’ homes. Police brutality occurred. Many suffered the loss of loved ones to incarceration or death. There were house fires and homelessness. Much of the dysfunction was systemic and rooted in racism,...

For the past six months the Institute for People, Place, and Possibility (IP3), the organization that stewards Community Commons, has furiously worked behind the scenes to help launch Well Being Legacy , in partnership with Well Being Trust , Community Initiatives and T he Rippel Foundation/Rethink Health . Well Being Legacy, a new national initiative, has big ambitions to shape wellbeing for future generations. It seeks to lift up a living agenda that brings together the most promising...

It was almost a ritual, but one that regularly disrupted the parenting class at a San Francisco-based child abuse prevention organization. Every time a siren blared in the streets below, a female participant bolted out of the room to seek safety in the windowless interior rooms of the multilevel labyrinthine white Victorian that houses Safe & Sound . Molly Jardiniano And it didn’t just happen in the parenting class. “When she heard the fire trucks, she said she would become paralyzed,...

OAKLAND, Calif. — Dr. Nick Nelson walks through busy Highland Hospital to a sixth-floor exam room, where he sees patients from around the world who say they have fled torture and violence. Nelson, who practices internal medicine, is the medical director of the Highland Human Rights Clinic , part of the Alameda Health System. A few times each week, he and his team conduct medical evaluations of people who are seeking asylum in the United States. The doctors listen to the patients’ stories.

Black babies are two times more likely to die in their first year of life than white babies. This is a gap that has persisted in our country for decades. Around the country, people are trying in big ways and small to close it. The Castlemont neighborhood in East Oakland is known as a Best Babies Zone . The idea of this initiative is that improving life for everyone in the community will ultimately save babies. [For more on this story by Priska Neely, go to...

Here is a roundup of a few articles by experts in various fields that provide context and detail to the understanding that child separations are more than a saddening inconvenience- they are detrimental to the emotional and physical well-being of young people.

It started as an answer to a youth-led campaign. Young people in arts programs in San Francisco Bay Area schools had produced spoken word videos about inequities in their communities that helped put them at risk for type 2 diabetes. Dr. Jean Junior The response by their peers was enormous, according to Dr. Jean Junior, who volunteered for the project as a pediatric resident at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). “Young people would say ‘You’ve actually gotten me interested.

Photo by Terabass/ CC-SA-3.0 It was around 2010 that Dr. Angela Bymaster was seeing a disturbing pattern in the histories of her adult patients. She already knew that patients who saw her at the Valley Homeless Health Care Program in San Jose, CA, where she worked at the time, were homeless or recently homeless. What was most troubling to Bymaster was knowing that their current precarious existence could have been prevented. Dr. Angela Bymaster “Over and over and over again I was hearing the...

When Tramischa Cole , a homeless 24-year-old mother of one, stumbled across a Civicorps flier in 2015, she didn’t expect to be accepted into the Bay Area’s only accredited high school and job training program for 18 to 26 year olds. It’s not that Civicorps had a waiting list: Cole was worried her parenting responsibilities and lack of housing would be an issue. “I told them I’m homeless and I don’t have child care,” Cole said. “I thought everything I was telling them would be something to...

As far back as she can remember, Berkeley City College Mental Health Specialist Janine Greer understood that there was a connection between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and health. She had a sense early on that racism figures large in that equation. “Looking around in my community – I’m African American, I noticed that even people who had healthy habits got funky diseases,” she said. “And I’m thinking there must be some sort of health trouble that happens if you’re always stressed.”...

Cat Brooks hears firsthand the anxiety in her neighbors' voices when talk turns to the police. She sees the fear in their eyes when a cruiser drives down the street. Police violence can have a ripple effect on communities, says Brooks, a co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project , an Oakland, California-based group working to create a support system for communities of color. It leaves a psychological and emotional toll. "I see it in the ways rage explodes on the street in response to...