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Are you rocking #ACEsScience and want to give your amazing work a shout out? Share your work in 500 words or less and submit it NOW! The ACEs Conference Project Showcase is a unique way to focus a spotlight on current research, programs, tools or other initiatives that use ACEs science to address childhood adversity and its impact. Before submitting, please consider the following: Project submissions should align with the conference theme of “Action to Access,” and its three intentions to...

California Women's Well-Being Index In Partnership With the Women's Foundation of California Women's Well-Being Index: Overall When women thrive, their families and communities prosper . Yet despite decades of progress, women still face persistent disparities on a range of issues, from economic security to health to participation in political leadership. By viewing women’s well-being as encompassing various distinct yet interrelated components, policymakers, advocates, service providers, and...

In March , the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a motion that promised to tackle one of the most pressing issues the county’s child welfare and juvenile justice systems face: how to change the tragically life-altering effects of being caught up in both. For oft-labeled “crossover youth,” having a foot in both systems can easily result in incarceration, homelessness and substance abuse issues later in life. Amid the bleak outcomes for foster youth and those involved in the...

About 30 percent of high school students in California go on to graduate from college, but only about 8 percent of foster youth make it that far, according to research by the Public Policy Institute of California and the University of Chicago. Young people who spend their teen years in foster care are more likely to land in jail than to earn a college degree. Those bleak prospects deter some students from even considering higher-ed options. Under the umbrella of Guardian Scholars programs,...

Despite some incremental progress, Los Angeles Unified officials continue to “evade” the requirement of the state’s education funding formula to spend substantially more on schools serving low-income children and other students who generate additional revenue for the district, authors of a study released on Tuesday wrote. In their fourth annual analysis of spending in the state’s largest school district, the United Way of Greater Los Angeles and Communities of Los Angeles Student Success, a...

Women who experience sexual assault are more likely to need medical care for mental health and stress-related problems in the year following the attack, new research suggests. Researchers at Kaiser Permanente analyzed the medical records of 1,350 women in northern California who were sexually assaulted between 2009 and 2015. They compared the women’s use of health-care services and their diagnoses in the years before and after the assault. The study also compared the victims’ records with...

The second annual 4CA Policymaker Education Day on May 22, brought together 75 community members across California to visit 81 legislators or their staff members and educate them about ACEs, trauma and resilience.

TUNE IN: Every week get the tools and skills to Overcome Life’s Difficulties. The “ACE Overcomers Radio Program” hosted by Dave Lockridge, Adverse Childhood Experiences and Building Healthy Life Skills Expert began airing on June 2 nd on KYOS Radio (1480AM/107.3FM), Merced’s News Talk! SHOW TIME: Saturdays 9AM-9:30AM on KYOS Radio (1480AM/107.3FM) Listen Live: http://www.1480kyos.com/ SHOW DESCRIPTION: WARNING… REAL TALK… This will be a unique and thought-provoking program that blends faith...

Thirty years before Julius Thibodeaux became the leader of Sacramento's controversial new anti-gun violence program, Advance Peace , he was a shooter himself. He pulled the trigger on his first victim when he was 15 — over a $5 dispute. Now, he has been hired by the city of Sacramento to run Advance Peace as it expands here . The program matches dangerous young people with elders who have lived similar lives. Often felons like Thibodeaux, these mentors have criminal infamy that still carries...

In an effort to streamline the evaluation of a household’s fitness to take in a foster or adoptive child, California implemented a pilot project called Resource Family Approval (RFA) as a pillar of its reforms. On the surface this is a good thing, since it means that rather than putting a candidate through multiple processes of varying thoroughness for potential caregivers, the new process would offer a single, comprehensive standard that includes mandated foster parent training,...

On most days, social service worker Lita Meza can be found in her Toyota Prius transporting her clients from Riverside County’s jails to outside rehabilitation programs all over Southern California. For 16 years, she has been the force behind the Alternative Sentencing Program run out of the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office. “Lita changes lives every day,” said Riverside County Public Defender Steve Harmon. “I would go further and say Lita saves lives every day. She takes people who...

On March 21, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed an important motion that instructed the Director of the Office of Child Protection, Michael Nash, former presiding judge of Los Angeles County’s Juvenile Court, to find out why so many of LA County’s foster children were crossing into the county’s delinquency system, what could be done to prevent that crossing, and how these so-called crossover kids could be helped if and when and if they found themselves in the clutches of both...