Tagged With "San Quentin"
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California Can Lead the Nation in Science-Based Juvenile Justice Solutions [napavalleyregister.com]
By Stephanie James, Napa Valley Register, January 2, 2020 California’s juvenile justice system has evolved as we have learned more about brain development, the effects of adverse childhood experiences and social, emotional, and mental health needs of our young people. While ensuring community safety, we have moved away from the old norms of an overly punitive system to one that follows research and science to fulfill the statutorily stated mission of juvenile justice: rehabilitation. I have...
Calendar Event
Trauma Informed Yoga Outreach Training (Oakland, CA)
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Watch documentary "Invisible Bars" April 15th, at 9 pm on KRCB TV
On April 15, KRCB TV 22 will present Invisible Bars , about new California programs that take into account the damage done to families in the age of runaway incarceration. Filmmaker John Beck came to our studios with Fred Stillman, who served more than two decades in California prisons for murder. and his daughter Jessica – one of his seven children – who works in Santa Rosa. Jessica started visiting her dad in prison at age 9 – she’s now in her early 30s. Her visits used to be behind glass...
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Why Silicon Valley is teaming up with San Quentin to train young people to code (usatoday.com)
Inside an aging brick facility ringed by a chain-link fence and agricultural fields, 14 young people convicted of violent crimes are trying to program a better future for themselves. For the past two months they’ve been learning to write code through a first-of-its-kind pilot program at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility in Camarillo, California, about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. They’re looking to break that streets-to-prison cycle by picking up new skills – JavaScript, HTML,...
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Yoga helping inmates transcend jail cells [KEYT - Santa Barbara]
An ancient spiritual practice is helping rehabilitate men and women at the Santa Barbara County Jail. Prison Yoga Santa Barbara (PYSB) invites inmates to practice yoga, meditation and mindfulness during incarceration at no cost to taxpayers. Ginny Kuhn is the force behind the non-profit staffed by volunteers. The program is modeled after The Prison Yoga Project which was started yogi James Fox at California’s San Quentin State Prison 15 years ago. Kuhn's motto for PYSB is 'Working Freedom...
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SF Plans to Close Juvenile Hall, but a New Proposal Would Put More Youths There [sfchronicle.com]
By Jill Tucker and Joaquin Palomino, San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 2019 Even as San Francisco moves toward the unprecedented closure of its juvenile hall to end the jailing of young people, a new proposal by probation officials could significantly increase the number of youths held there. The idea to create a “detention-based therapeutic program” shocked many city officials, who criticized the plan as an unvetted move by juvenile probation officials to fill empty cells and save the...
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State Funding Provides New, Expanded Behavior Health Program for Residents [benitolink.com]
By County of San Benito Behavioral Health Department, BenitoLink, November 4, 2019 PATHS program provides an array of services to children and youth that aim to support enhanced social/emotional development, improve social skills, school performance, and provide linkage to mental health and substance use disorder services. The Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) was approved by California voters in 2004 to provide increased funding towards programs within Behavioral Health departments to...
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San Juan Capistrano Christian PTSD Drug Rehab Trauma Informed Care Launched [newswire.net]
By willian brown, Newswire, February 6, 2020 San Juan Capistrano Christian PTSD drug rehab center PTSD & Trauma Drug Rehab launched trauma informed care services and a special First Responder Drug Rehab Program in Orange County. These services are delivered by licensed counselors and therapists as residential or outpatient treatments. San Juan Capistrano Christian PTSD drug rehab center Christian Drug & Alcohol Treatment Centers (CDAT) dba PTSD & Trauma Drug Rehab has launched...
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UCSF sets up coronavirus hotline [sfchronicle.com]
From San Francisco Chronicle, March 25, 2020 UC San Francisco is using a hotline to deal with patients with suspected coronavirus. Health care navigators have been taking about 250 calls a week — 466 on March 17 alone- since the virus outbreak. Navigators screen and classify patients as negative or positive and have escalated up to 100 positive cases in a single day. More advanced practice nursing students will soon join the six current navigators to deal with the demand. [ Please click here...
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Dispatches From San Quentin: Is San Quentin State Prison The Future Of Prison Reform? [witnessla.com]
By James King (WLA Guest), Witness LA, October, 20, 2019 I hear it all the time. “San Quentin is unique,” “If only we could take what’s happening here and reproduce it in other prisons,” blah, blah, blah. You know what? That was kind of overdramatic. Let me start again. I have yet to meet anyone here who doesn’t think San Quentin is the best prison in the state, and possibly on the country. As a person who has been here for nearly six years, I can confirm that the opportunities at this...
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Drug Abuse, Trafficking and Addiction in California’s Central Valley
California’s Central Valley stretches from Bakersfield in the south to Redding in the north. The Valley encompasses a great deal of the state’s interior, and includes major cities including Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, Visalia and Bakersfield. Though it is not as densely populated as the major cities of California, the valley’s substance abuse and addiction rates are well above those in the metropolitan areas. Drugs are Abundant in California’s Central Valley Though much of Central Valley...
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Judge: Pretrial Inmates in San Francisco Need Time in Sunlight [courthousenews.com]
By Maria Dinzeo, Courthouse News Service, February 3, 2020 For years, the city and county of San Francisco has housed inmates awaiting trial in tiny cells, letting them out for only a few hours a day for exercise and often depriving them of any time outdoors, but conditions are set to improve for some after a federal judge ruled Friday that pretrial detainees incarcerated for more than four years must be given at least one hour a week of access to direct sunlight. The order handed down by...
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Keeping Kids Out of Cells [sfchronicle.com]
By Jill Tucker and Joaquin Palomino, San Francisco Chronicle, December 29, 2019 The two-story brick building on a quiet street in Queens doesn’t stand out from the million-dollar homes scattered throughout the neighborhood. There are no signs on the former Catholic convent, nothing to indicate that inside are five New York City teens who committed felony assault, grand larceny, gun possession or another serious crime. Placed here by a judge’s order, each is spending an average of seven...
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Latino's coronavirus burden [sfchronicle.com]
By Joaquin Palomino and Tatiana Sanchez, San Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 2020 As people came into San Francisco General Hospital with chest pain, dry coughs and fevers — telltale signs of the new coronavirus — Dr. Vivek Jain noticed an unsettling pattern: The vast majority of people so sick that they needed to be hospitalized were Latino. Jain, an infectious disease specialist who is part of the team directing the hospital’s COVID-19 response, was prepared to see an influx of low-income...
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Long Lives Cut Short [sfchronicle.com]
By Lizzie Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle, May 15, 2020 He shuffled out of the house on Innes Avenue, shoulders hunched and legs trembling. The early spring day was clear and breezy. Sunshine baked the driveway. But Wilbur Morris didn’t notice. He settled into the front seat of his daughter’s gray Mercury Mirage, too weak to buckle the seat belt or shut the door, so she did it for him. Wilbur had been a healthy 80-year-old. His preferred drink was nonalcoholic beer. He jogged 3 miles every...
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Making Mental Health Needs a Priority [smdailyjournal.com]
By Anna Schussler, The Daily Journal, December 26, 2019 When San Carlos resident Suzanne Hughes formed a nonprofit offering mental health services four years ago, she started out with just three interns and a mission to make them affordable and accessible to anyone who might need them. Trained as a marriage and family therapist, Hughes drew from more than 20 years of mental health experience to identify what she saw as the most pressing mental health needs and build programs to address them.
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Harmonium CEO Rosa Ana Lozada “walks the talk” of trauma-informed, resilience-building practices
Harmonium staff pictured (left to right ) Front row: Brian Newcomer, Rosa Ana Lozada, Heidi Echeverria, and Janice Tangback Back row: Amy De Meules, Natalie Kessler, and Justin Campbell There’s almost a Zen-like feeling when you walk into the office of Rosa Ana Lozada, chief executive officer of Harmonium, Inc. The deep red accent wall, large corner windows, and small Japanese fountain send a message that a trauma-informed, resilience-building mindset starts at the top of this...
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New Coalition Created to End Child Poverty in San Diego County [kpbs.org]
By Maya Trabulsi, KPBS, February 5, 2020 KPBS Evening Edition anchor Maya Trabulsi talked with Erin Hogeboom, the director of San Diego For Every Child, about a new initiative launched to end child poverty in San Diego County. Q: Research is showing that San Diego families are struggling and, more specifically, the basic needs of some children are not being met. Can you talk to us about what the current state of child poverty is here in San Diego County? A: Yes. So, in San Diego County, 40%...
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New Housing for Formerly Homeless Residents Opens in Downtown San Jose [mercurynews.com]
By Emily Deruy, The Mercury News, Decemeber 2, 2019 As a fierce rainstorm drenched San Jose a few nights ago, Ericka Avila slept soundly in her new studio apartment just steps from St. James Park. Several weeks ago, that would have been out of the question. The 42-year-old spent years sleeping in her car, parked mostly at a Walmart on Story Road and sometimes at a library on Tully Road. When rain poured down or lightening flashed, Avila would peer out her windows, frightened and alone. “I’m...
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One City Heights School is Doing the Nearly Impossible: Closing the Achievement Gap [voiceofsandiego.com]
By Will Huntsberry, Voice of San Diego, March 2, 2020 In San Diego, as with the rest of the country, poverty tracks closely with test scores. The social science is clear: Poorer children are not less bright. They lack the same opportunities as their more affluent peers to gain cognitive skills from the moment they are born. The most pressing question in education has always been whether schools can supercharge the learning process enough to compensate for these class inequities. At Edison...
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Op-Ed: California's Forgotten Slave History [latimes.com]
By Sarah Barringer and Kevin Waite, Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2020 Separated by just 60 miles along the I-10, Los Angeles and San Bernardino feel worlds apart. The former boasts some of the richest urban developments and residential pockets in the nation. The latter — a “broken city,” as this newspaper put it in 2015 — struggled through five years of bankruptcy and municipal dysfunction. But their roles in this California tale of two cities were once reversed. Before the Civil War, San...
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Overdoses in California prisons up 113% in three years — nearly 1,000 incidents in 2018 (sfchronicle.com)
Nearly 1,000 men and women in California prisons overdosed last year and required emergency medical attention in what officials acknowledge is part of an alarming spike in opioid use by those behind bars, according to records obtained by The Chronicle. The number of inmates treated for drug or alcohol overdoses jumped from 469 to 997 from 2015 to 2018 — a 113% increase. While many of the prisoners survived, the most recent data available show drug-related inmate deaths are on the rise, too —...
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Parent with ACEs: Is it Time to Change Your Parenting Playbook [sfbayview.com]
By Diana Hembree, San Francisco Bay View, February 1, 2020 If you experienced severe hardship as a child, are you more likely to have children with behavior or mental health problems? The short answer is yes. A recent UCLA study shows that the children of parents with four or more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), such as abuse or neglect, are twice as likely to develop ADHD, which makes it more likely children will become hyperactive and unable to pay attention or control their...
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Parenting With ACEs: How You Can Support Your Toddler [sfbayview.com]
By Diana Hembree, San Francisco Bay View, November 11, 2019 “My 2-year-old keeps falling down when he tries to walk.” “My son is almost 24 months old, but all he can say is ‘mama’ and dada.’” “She just turned 2, and she still can’t follow the simplest instructions.” When your toddler misses a developmental milestone, like taking her first steps by age 2, it’s natural to fret. After all, in very rare cases, such delays may be a sign of an underlying condition. But a recent study suggests that...
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Prison Yoga Project Goes Behind Bars to Help Inmates Heal Their Trauma (Inside Edition)
By Inside Edition staff, February 8, 2020 Once a week, yoga teacher Chanda Williams walks through the gates at San Quentin Prison with her yoga mat under her arm to teach a class. She’s an instructor with the Prison Yoga Project, a non-profit organization that brings the ancient practice behind the walls of correctional facilities across the world to help inmates heal their trauma. Williams says it’s her way of trying to help break the cycle of incarceration many prisoners find themselves...
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Race Counts: San Mateo Data
The RACE COUNTS project maintains a comprehensive tracking tool of racial disparities across the state in seven key issue areas: Democracy Economic Opportunity Crime & Justice Access to Health Care Healthy Built Environment Education Housing Check out the info on San Mateo County . A few key takeaways: San Mateo is a high performance, high disparity, and less populous county. In San Mateo County, 37% of Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders own the homes they live in,...
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Childhood trauma a crucial public health issue [CapitolWeekly.net]
Preventing childhood trauma should be one of the top goals of California policymakers, a coalition of child advocates say. About 150 of the advocates came to Sacramento last week to educate legislators about the devastating effects of adverse childhood experiences. The goal was to help legislators create policies that will better protect kids. Adverse childhood experiences, known as ACEs, are experiences that are so harmful to children’s developing brains that they affect their lives decades...
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Commentary: San Diego's Anti-Domestic Violence Center Replicated Across U.S. [sandiegouniontribune.com]
By Casey Gwinn, The San Diego Union-Tribune, November 14, 2019 In 2002, during my tenure as the San Diego city attorney, we opened the nationally acclaimed San Diego Family Justice Center. For the first time anywhere in America, we brought together 25 agencies under one roof to meet the needs of domestic and sexual violence victims. The results were stunning. During our journey from the very beginning of planning the center through 2008, we saw a 90% drop in domestic violence homicides in...
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County Adopts Regional Plan to Bulk Up Services for Seniors [sandiegouniontribune.com]
By Charles T. Clark, The San Diego Union-Tribune, October 1, 2019 The San Diego region’s older population is growing rapidly, and the county has a plan it hopes will bolster services for seniors. County supervisors adopted a comprehensive regional plan, dubbed the “Aging Roadmap,” intended to meet the needs of older adults in the region and keep seniors in their homes as long as possible. The plan, created by staff in the Health and Human Services Agency’s Aging and Independence Services,...
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County Moves Forward With Plan for Behavioral Health Hubs [voiceofsandiego.org]
By Lisa Halverstadt, Voice of San Diego, October 29, 2019 County supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to move forward with efforts to create a network of behavioral health hubs and crisis units countywide, starting in North County and central San Diego. The goal is to shift the county’s mental health system from one overtaxed by emergency room visits and hospital stays to a more efficient chronic care system that helps patients stabilize before they fall into crisis. “It’s not just one...
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Cruel and Unusual: A Guide to California’s Broken Prisons and the Fight to Fix Them [propublica.org]
Sacramento Bee and Propublica, May 28, 2019. A decade ago, so many inmates were crammed into California’s prisons that the sprawling system had reached a breaking point. Prisoners were sleeping in gyms, hallways and dayrooms. Mentally ill prisoners were jammed into tiny holding cells. There were dozens of riots and hundreds of attacks on guards every year. Suicide rates were 80% higher than in the rest of the nation’s prisons. The California prison population peaked at more than 165,000 in...
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California to Start First-in-the-Nation Training to Help Transgender Voters [sfchronicle.com]
By Joe Garofoli, The San Francisco Chronicle, October 25, 2019 California Secretary of State Alex Padilla will announce a first-in-the-nation partnership Friday with an LGBTQ civil rights group to train poll workers to make it easier for gender-nonconforming and transgender voters to cast ballots, The Chronicle has learned. In most cases, California voters are not required to show identification to a polling-place worker. Still, many transgender and gender-nonconforming voters may be...
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Hospitals prepare for wave of mental health disorders among their workers [latimes.com]
By Del Quentin Wilber, Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2020 Nurse Camille Davis has watched more than 30 patients die from coronavirus infection, and has sobbed while holding her phone close to them so loved ones could say their goodbyes. Her long drives home are filled with worry about transmitting the disease to her 8-year-old son. “I had a colleague who wanted to quit, it was too much for her, and I told her, ‘We can’t quit. We have to keep working until we get sick,’” said Davis, a nurse at...
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How collaboration helps clinic in San Mateo County, CA, tackle ACEs in children
Dr. Elizabeth Grady is a pediatrician at the South San Francisco Clinic, a community clinic of San Mateo Medical Center. She and Susana Flores , a senior public health nurse with San Mateo County Health, spoke with me about how the clinic and other health agencies in San Mateo have been able to craft ways to work together to prevent and heal toxic stress in children. Grady also talked about how she and Flores have been working with the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative (RBC), a group of...
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How San Francisco's D.A. Is Decreasing The Jail Population Amid COVID-19 [npr.org]
By Terry Gross, National Public Radio, April 9, 2020 Chesa Boudin's radical leftist parents were imprisoned when he was a toddler. Now he's working to reduce the inmate population in San Francisco — and worrying about his dad, who remains in prison. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. It's difficult or impossible to practice social distancing in an overcrowded prison, which is dangerous not only for the people who are incarcerated but also for the guards and other prison...
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How to Talk to Kids About Homelessness [nytimes.com]
By Jill Cowan, The New York Times, November 25, 2019 Homelessness is a part of everyday life for many California schoolchildren, for those who experience it and those who see it near schools and playgrounds. “I’m a working mother of two who has had to raise children to be not only aware and empathetic toward homeless people, but have also had to train my kids how to instantly spot an aggressive mentally ill person who may be a threat to them,” wrote Kristin, a reader in San Francisco.
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Re: Drug Abuse, Trafficking and Addiction in California’s Central Valley
Thanks for the post, Cheryl. Has Elevate Addiction Services integrated trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on ACEs science? If so, I'd love to hear more about that.
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Re: Parent with ACEs: Is it Time to Change Your Parenting Playbook [sfbayview.com]
Perhaps it is time to take Dr. Felitti's advice and begin seeking ways to improve the overall quality of parenting in communities.
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Calls to eliminate school police in two San Francisco Bay districts intensify amid protests [edsource.org]
By Theresa Harrington and Ali Tadayon, EdSource, June 10, 2020 Amid calls to defund municipal police in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, two Oakland Unified school board members are pushing to eliminate the district’s police force. This is an acceleration of a demand that dates back nine years, when activists began calling on the district to dissolve its police department after a black student was shot and killed by a district police sergeant. The proposal by board...
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Coronavirus cases at San Quentin soar to 190: 'they're calling man down every 20 or 30 minutes' [sfchronicle.com]
By Jason Fagone and Megan Cassidy, San Francisco Chronicle, June 20, 2020 A week ago, Jessica Miller-Marez received a troubling phone call from her husband, 37-year-old Jesse Marez, who is incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County. Something strange was happening at San Quentin, Jesse told her. A large number of prisoners had recently arrived on buses from somewhere in Southern California and had been placed in cells on the upper tiers of Jesse’s housing area — a unit known as...
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Many Latino workers fear getting tested for COVID-19. A San Francisco program aims to change that [latimes.com]
By Melissa Gomez, Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2020 At least once a week in the mornings, Elsa Hernandez walks the mile from her apartment to the Mission Language and Vocational School, sometimes falling in line behind hundreds of other Latinos picking up groceries from the Mission Food Hub. But on a recent Thursday afternoon, she stood in a different line near the hub. Wearing a mask, her red glasses propped on her head, Hernandez, 44, a longtime resident of San Francisco’s Mission District,...
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UCSF White Coats for Black Lives Statement on the Public Health Crisis at San Quentin State Prison and Other California Prisons and Jails [medium.com]
By UCSF White Coats for Black Lives, July 26, 2020 To Governor Gavin Newsom and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation: As doctors, nurses and healthcare workers of California, we write to you today in outrage at the conditions of the California Prison system. With 2,401 COVID-19 cases and 17 deaths, the outbreak at San Quentin is now the second largest in the nation. This is a public health crisis — one that impacts not only those Californians who are currently...
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The Resilient Beginnings Network Is Taking Grant Applications - Due Date September 18th
Interested SF Bay Area safety net organizations can apply for funding to participate in this three-year program on resilience and trauma-informed care.
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San Diego Organizations Work Together To Shed Light on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
SAN DIEGO – The American Academy of Pediatrics, California Chapter 3 (AAP-CA3 ) together with YMCA of San Diego County , San Diego State University Social Policy Institute and San Diego Accountable Community for Health (SDACH) are joining forces as ACEs Aware grantees to assist San Diego Medi-Cal providers screen and treat Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress. The ACEs Aware initiative is a first-of-its-kind effort led by the Office of the California Surgeon General and the...
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Sharing the Virtual Space: A Reflection on the ACEs Aware Care Network Tri-County Leadership Convening
On Monday, October 19, 2020, over 60 leaders from Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties virtually gathered to begin weaving connections at the Tri-County ACEs Aware Care Network Leadership Convening. Under the guidance of Barbara Finch (SBC Department of Social Services, KIDS Network), Terri Allison (Moonlit Consulting), and Carl Palmer (LegacyWorks Group), participants came together with the intention of learning about local implementation of the ACEs Aware initiative,...
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Re: Sharing the Virtual Space: A Reflection on the ACEs Aware Care Network Tri-County Leadership Convening
Thanks for letting us know about this inspiring meeting, Hanna!
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uncuffed.org (Radio Station within San Quentin and Solano Prisons in California)
KALW , an NPR member station in San Francisco, has led classes in audio production inside San Quentin State Prison since 2012, and Solano Prison since 2018. Since then, KALW has aired over 80 stories produced inside the walls. Radio producers from KALW visit the prisons to teach classes in audio production, and to help edit the stories. Audio engineers at KALW do some final polishing before it goes out to the world. KALW’s classes in prisons are supported by the California Arts Council's...
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New Prevention Institute video about the importance of healing for health, safety, and wellbeing
Dear Friends: Hope you all have been doing well! I’m writing to share a two-minute video we’ve created to highlight the work of Heal SF, Healing City Baltimore, and St. Louis ReCAST. These groups are doing incredible work: transforming systems to support frontline workers, building community connections, and funding projects that matter to the community. Amidst the pandemic, adverse climate events, and ongoing racial injustices that have strained our mental wellbeing, community-led efforts...