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As you contemplate your 2017 resolutions, consider investing time in the most vulnerable kids in our community. It might be the highest yielding investment of your life. Stories of neglect and abuse are tragically common. When the abuse ends, ramifications can, and often do, continue well into adulthood. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente conducted a study in the 1990s called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACEs). Researchers found that in high...

There will be a free webinar on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 10:00am - 11:30am To register for this Free Webinar, please see the following: Register at: https://cdeevents.webex.com/cdeevents/onstage/g.php?MTID=e98afd6cd988b25234145fb3c7f4f1331 Event number: 663 922 756 Event password: 130777 TIPS FOR ATTENDEES To save time before the meeting, check your system to make sure it is ready to use WebEx. Step 1: Visit the test site at http://www.webex.com/test-meeting.html Step 2: If you experience...

In their laudable effort to reverse mass incarceration, California policymakers have been too slow to provide felons with necessary care and treatment upon their release. That’s among the conclusions to be gleaned from an important reporting project by newspapers in Palm Springs, Ventura, Salinas and Redding analyzing Proposition 47, the 2014 initiative that cut penalties for drug possession and property theft, and reduced many crimes to misdemeanors. “Thousands of addicts and mentally ill...

In California and across the country, suicide is the second leading cause of death among teens—a grim reminder that many high school students’ primary barrier to adulthood is themselves. More young people take their own lives than the number killed by cancer, heart disease, birth defects, stroke, flu, pneumonia and chronic lung disease combined. And under legislation set to take effect in January, school systems up and down the state will be forced to confront the taboo topic head-on.

The Chadwick Center for Children & Families at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego has just released a set of trauma-informed guidelines with concrete strategies for approaching secondary traumatic stress (STS). While these guidelines were created for intended use within child welfare systems, they may be easily adapted into other child-and family-serving organizations. These guidelines were created as part of the Chadwick Trauma-Informed Systems Dissemination and Implementation Project...

Orange County hopes to get homeless residents into housing – and help them stay there. Riverside County plans to connect former inmates with health clinics and social services. Placer County is opening a respite center where homeless patients can go after they leave the hospital. Those are just some of the pilot projects in a $3 billion experimental effort officials hope will improve the health of California’s most vulnerable populations. The effort is a recognition that improving people’s...

Imagine you’re a ninth grade student in a public high school. Everyone you know is straight and you’re not. There are no resources at school for you. The school doesn’t care about your identity. Imagine further that you go to school every day to learn only about people who do not share your identity. Nothing in the history of America depicts the life you’re living. No one who has faced the same challenges you face has made a valuable contribution to history. Do you want to go to school? Do...

Riverside County has become the nation’s first large county to meet “functional zero,” a federal benchmark for making permanent housing available for all homeless veterans who seek assistance from the county. The board of supervisors established the Veteran Assistance Leadership of Riverside County (VALOR) initiative in June 2013 to find permanent housing for every homeless veteran in Riverside County. Together, the Housing Authority division of the county Economic Development Agency, the...

For the second year in a row, Los Angeles reported the largest number of chronically homeless people in the nation — nearly 13,000 — and 95% of them live outdoors, in cars, tents and encampments, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s report to Congress released Wednesday. Los Angeles also topped the national register this year in homeless veterans — 2,700 — despite slashing the numbers by a third. It also recorded the most unaccompanied homeless youth — more...

I found this document by Futures Without Violence to be a useful resource. From the forward: The health care system plays an important role both in identifying children who may be exposed to extreme adversity and violence, currently and in the past, and in providing the evidence-based interventions that can help children heal from trauma and prevent health conditions and other poor outcomes associated with trauma and ACEs. The health care system is also central in supporting the greatest...

Why is it that some of us are able to overcome childhood trauma while others are not? Resilience, the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, can curb the effects of trauma and adversity such as physical abuse, exposure to substance abuse, and unmet basic needs. In California, an estimated one third of children are not resilient when facing a challenge, according to parent-reported data from the National Survey of Children's Health, now available on Kidsdata. The data come from a...

Manuel Dircio, 20, a business administration student at Fullerton College boasts a 4.0 GPA. He is also a recovering alcoholic with a history of arrest and incarceration in juvenile detention — not quite what you’d expect from a seemingly model college student with a stellar grade point. Dircio credits the Youthful Offender Wraparound program (YOW), which he says “helped [him] grow successfully.” It’s what’s known as a full-service partnership (FSP) in Orange County, California, that uses a...