Blog

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...

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Taylor is on the right track. The agency recommends that all babies be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months. On average, however, California women aren’t coming close to that goal. In fact, surveys show the rate of exclusive breast-feeding takes a big dive when babies hit the three-month mark. That’s about the time when many women have to return to work. Read the entire article HERE

In the final weeks of the 114 th Congress, Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) welcomed her colleague Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) as a new host in the third and final briefing on addressing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The December 1 briefing focused on public policies to improve coordination, prevention and response to childhood trauma. In addition to joining forces to raise awareness of the impact of ACEs, Senators Heitkamp and Durbin are drafting legislation based on a framework they...

Over 400,000 women in the U.S. suffer from postpartum depression each year. Yet only an estimated 15 percent of those mothers receive treatment, and countless women who have suffered from PPD report feeling deeply alone in their struggles. But the federal government is offering families a glimmer of hope for the future of maternal mental health in the U.S. On Nov. 30, Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.) announced that her maternal mental health legislation, the Bringing Postpartum Depression...

California would create "safe zones" prohibiting immigration enforcement on public schools, hospital and courthouse grounds under a new bill by state Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) that is sure to clash with the tough enforcement plans of President-elect Donald Trump . By also proposing to bar state and local law enforcement from enforcing immigration laws, De León is doubling down on the issue at a time when Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from “sanctuary...