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Efforts to help and house Orange County’s homeless may become more fruitful under a soon-to-be hired “homeless czar” and the formation of a faith-based coalition focused on Santa Ana’s Civic Center, site of the county’s highest concentration of people living on the streets. County officials confirmed that Susan Price, who has been the point person on homeless issues for the city of Long Beach, is expected to start work May 27 as Orange County’s social care coordinator, a job that entails...

About 230 people fill this room, most from Stanislaus County. The screen has the title of the meeting. Carol Redding, a pioneer in communications about ACEs; Elaine Karas Miller, executive director of the Trauma Resource Institute; and I will be doing presentations today. Angela Ponivas, bureau chief of the state Office of Child Abuse Prevention, says that she's working to educate people in her department about ACE science. She doesn't want California to get any more D- grades from Children...

The Shasta County Public Health Department will use a $50,000 grant from Partnership HealthPlan to begin measuring adverse childhood experiences among Shasta County adults — the first time such a study has been conducted since 2012. Hill Country Health and Wellness Center, Shasta Community Health Center, and Mercy Medical Center's Maternity Center and Family Medicine programs will work on the project starting in June. Health care providers at those medical centers will ask patients whether...

On April 18, at Cuesta College, Gabriella Grant, director of the California Center of Excellence for Trauma Informed Care and an innovative reformer of publicly provided services, presented Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) to nearly 300 professionals from SLO County’s public health and correctional agencies. She described a powerful, low-cost, effective transformation of our services to provide a dramatic solution to thousands of people who struggle with mental health problems, drug abuse,...

Twenty years ago this month, Redwood Children’s Services placed its first foster child with a foster family. Camille Schraeder, the executive director and founder of what she expected to be “just a little foster family agency,” had just received her license on April 22, after taking out a line of credit on her new house to lease office equipment. She had just left Trinity School, a facility for troubled youth under the Southern California parent company Guadalupe Homes. Trinity was based on...

When Jake was a child, his parents would scream at him every day. They told him everything he did was wrong and he was worthless. One day when Jake was 4, his father threw him against the wall three times. It was not until his mother found Jake talking to himself at age 12 that she saw he — and her family — needed help. When Jake entered therapy, he was hearing voices in his head and had a severe stutter. He never felt safe and found it hard to trust others. Today, Jake, a 58-year-old Los...

Retired U.S. Army Capt. Luis Carlos Montalván once received some sage advice from an old sergeant of his. “He said, ‘Smile, be nice. But always have a plan to kill everyone in the room,’” Montalván recalls. Those words appeared in the documentary film Buried Above Ground, a riveting look at three survivors of post-traumatic stress disorder trying to exist with the mental and physical effects of the trauma they experienced. For Montalván, that trauma was the result of war. For a woman named...

Homelessness increased in the last year in the city and county of Los Angeles, leaving nearly 47,000 people in the streets and shelters despite an intensive federal push that slashed the ranks of homeless veterans by nearly a third, according to figures released Wednesday by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Nearly two-thirds of the homeless people tallied countywide, or 28,000, were in the city of Los Angeles, representing an 11% jump in January from a year earlier, a report from...

Los Angeles County on Tuesday approved sweeping restrictions on the use of solitary confinement for juvenile detainees, joining a larger movement against a practice that some consider cruel and unproductive. The Board of Supervisors' action bans solitary confinement at youth camps and halls except “as a temporary response to behavior that poses a serious and immediate risk of physical harm to any person.” In those cases, the supervisors said, the isolation should be only for a brief “cooling...

On April 27, "Healing Orange County from Childhood Trauma" held its first meeting in Mission Viejo, CA at a local restaurant from 6 to 8 pm. We posted it on meetup.com as the founding meeting of Orange County (CA) ACEs Connection. I was honored to co-create the meeting with my dear friend Dana Brown, Southern California director for ACEs Connection. We felt awe as three education activists, six professional trauma therapy providers, individuals suffering child trauma and a total of 12 people...

On April 15th, representatives from 6 counties met on a conference call to discuss recent First 5 activities around Trauma Informed Care (TIC). Since our first gathering at last year's Association Summit, we have been meeting quarterly via conference call and have learned that there is a lot going on with TIC. So much is going on that we decided to send out a survey gathering data to map all our TIC efforts across the state. Please let us know if you are at a First 5 and are interested in...

It is easy to sit at almost any intersection in our community, spot a person we presume to be homeless, mentally ill (or both), and think to ourselves “No one is doing anything about this.” Nothing could be further from the truth. First, make no mistake. The challenges of homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse and general disenfranchisement from our community are complex. There are no simple solutions. Five years ago, our community was in crisis. County mental health services were...