Blog

CWA was proud to again be a part of the California Breastfeeding Coalition's Mother-Baby Friendly Workplace Awards , recognizing businesses throughout California for their efforts to support lactating employees by creating lactation accommodation policies and working to come up with comfortable, appropriate solutions to meet the breastfeeding needs of staff when they return to work. We were encouraged that several California legislators were on hand this year to personally congratulate...

Are you ready to lead transformative change for children and families in California? Strategies 2.0, at the Child Abuse Prevention Center in Sacramento CA, is looking for a Senior Training and Technical Assistance Specialist who will help grow knowledge and networks for professionals working with families--through impactful consulting to collaborations and organizations, training to direct-service teams, and regional movement-building among family-building and community-building leaders.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on May 22 on the challenges that states face in their efforts to support children affected by trauma. The findings were based in part on interviewing state and local officials in six states (Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, Washington, and Wisconsin) along with questionnaires to 16 states. The request for the report was made by two Illinois members of Congress, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin and Congressman Danny Davis, and...

A physician, an advocate, a public health specialist, a suicide-attempt survivor and a California state lawmaker gathered in downtown Sacramento today to offer their diagnosis of the state’s mental health system. The consensus was summed up by Sen. Jim Beall: “We need to start from scratch.” The panel discussion, hosted by CALmatters and the California Health Care Foundation, builds off an ongoing CALmatters reporting project by Jocelyn Wiener and Byrhonda Lyons on the state’s fragmented,...

At-risk youth in Southwest Fresno can expect access to a new boxing ring, fitness equipment, meditation room and mentoring programs with help from Kaiser Permanente Fresno. With the ribbon cutting at the Cecil C. Hinton Community Center on Tuesday morning, Police Chief Jerry Dyer was in attendance, along with elected officials including Fresno Mayor Lee Brand, Fresno City Councilmember Miguel Arias, and Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp. Inside, they displayed some of the new...

Buprenorphine, a relative newcomer in the treatment of opioid addiction, is growing in popularity among California doctors as regulatory changes, physician training and other initiatives make the medication more widely accessible. The rate of Medi-Cal enrollees who received buprenorphine nearly quadrupled from the end of 2014 to the third quarter of 2018, according to data released by Medi-Cal , the state’s Medicaid program. The rate for methadone — an older and more commonly used drug — was...

our special education students and their parents or guardians filed a lawsuit last week against the state of California claiming they were emotionally and physically harmed when they were illegally put in restraint holds and secluded during behavioral interventions at their Concord school. The four students attended Floyd I. Marchus School , operated by the Contra Costa County Office of Education. The public school offers special education services and integrated counseling to 85 children...

In Los Angeles County, as in many other areas of the U.S., African American children are disproportionately overrepresented in foster care when compared with their representation in the general population. Research also shows that lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth are overrepresented in foster care. An August 2014 report by UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute found that LA County has 13.4% LGBQ-identified youth in foster care (compared to 7.2% in the...

Ever since he stole his first car at age 10, Cody Garland has spent much of his life behind bars. Now 35, he has served time at eight different California prisons. But the hardest stint, he says, was not in a state penitentiary. It was in a Sacramento County jail, where in 2016 he was sentenced to serve eight years for burglary, identity theft and other charges. Medical care at the jail was even worse than in prison; untreated glaucoma left him legally blind, he says. Solitary confinement —...

To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq : “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state , with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged . The basic problem is the...

Elizabeth Huntley recalls the day when her family’s life was turned upside down. “One day my mom woke up and she packed up all of our clothes, all five of us…and she took me and my younger sister who had the same father… down to my paternal grandmother’s house…and she left us there. She took my middle sister to a town near Birmingham, Ala., and left her there. She took my only brother and an older sister back to Huntsville and left them at a sister’s house. Then she went back to that housing...

We are excited to offer an exclusive virtual screening to all ACEs Connection members of the new, acclaimed film, CRACKED UP . This documentary film is about the long term effects of childhood trauma, told through Saturday Night Live veteran Darrell Hammond’s journey in discovering adverse childhood experiences at the root of his lifelong battle with self-harm, addiction, and misdiagnosis. The film’s director, Michelle Esrick, and other special guests will join us after the screening window...