Tagged With "Sacred Sons"
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37th Annual Child Abuse Prevention Symposium Recap
"Speak Out! Confronting the Culture of Child Sexual Abuse and Secrecy" was the theme of Santa Clara County's 37th Annual Child Abuse Prevention Symposium which featured a Keynote conversation with Olympic Gold Medal winning gymnast and current UCLA Assistant Gymnastics Coach Jordyn Wieber. Jordyn, and other athletes and survivors of former USA Gymnastics team doctor and serial child sex abuser Larry Nassar, earlier spoke to a U.S. Senate Subcommittee about a “culture of silence” more...
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A Haven From Trauma’s Cruel Grip [NYTimes.com]
San Francisco — The sun was preternaturally bright the day Clare Senchyna’s 26 year-old son Camilo, her only child, was shot and killed in a random act of violence in San Francisco. On that morning two years ago, Ms. Senchyna drew the orange curtains in her bedroom, pulled up her blankets and stayed in bed for much of the next several months. It seemed to her an appropriate response to the end of the world. Her son, an emergency medical technician, had been out celebrating the completion of...
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Bipartisan trauma resolution passes the House unanimously
In the late afternoon on Feb. 26, the House of Representatives unanimously passed H. Res. 443 , a resolution recognizing the importance and effectiveness of trauma-informed care and calling for a national trauma awareness month and trauma-informed awareness day. The impetus for the resolution resides with the First Lady of Wisconsin, Tonette Walker, who has taken a strong leadership role in advancing trauma-informed policy and practice statewide through Fostering Futures , and has elevated...
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Black People Disproportionately Homeless in California [calmatters.org]
By Kate Cimini, Cal Matters, October 5, 2019 Just a few years ago, Yolanda Harraway was living in a tent on the streets of Chinatown in Salinas, an agricultural hub struggling with a growing homeless community. Harraway’s slide into homelessness began when her son was taken from her custody by Child Protective Services. She struggled with addiction and had several felonies on her record, which cut her off from various state and government-funded housing options. She also had a hard time...
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CA announces robust perinatal depression prevention for Medi-Cal recipients
Melinda Coates experienced a tumultuous pregnancy. “I was really mentally upset literally from day one (of the pregnancy),” she says. (Melinda Coates is a pseudonym. To protect her and her children’s privacy and safety, we are not using her real name.) Coates had hoped to get counseling last October, when she was seven months pregnant. That’s when she enrolled in the state’s Medi-Cal program, shortly after she and her abusive husband moved to California, “but nobody was able to get me in...
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ACEs Aware Webinar: Trauma-informed practices to address stress from COVID-19
How can health care providers take care of themselves, their colleagues and their patients during this COVID-19 pandemic? First and foremost is recognizing how the pandemic can stir up trauma from the past, said Dr. Alicia Lieberman, a psychologist specializing in trauma. “COVID19 is reawakening traumatic reminders in many of us and in the families we work with. And that often makes it difficult for parents to protect themselves and their children,” she noted. Lieberman, the director of the...
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ACEs Science Champion Series: Dr. Angela Bymaster: This Faith-Based Physician Integrates ACEs Science with Healing Arts
Dr. Angela Bymaster, a family physician at Washington Elementary School in San Jose, CA, operates her clinic in a portable unit on the school property.
Because the unit faces students as they are dropped off by their families, she gets to “pick up the kids” before they are sent to the clinic, practicing “upstream medicine.”
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Want to get certified in Echo's new trauma-informed nonviolent parenting curriculum?
Want to get certified in Echo's new trauma-informed nonviolent parenting curriculum? For the last 18 years, Echo has been providing sliding-scale parenting classes in Los Angeles. The 10-class series includes the latest science on the brain and childhood trauma and gives parents many tools for creating the kind of safe, stable nurturing relationship we all want with our children and underpins healthy development. Classes are available in English and Spanish. This fall, Echo will be offering...
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Youth court banishes blame; leads with ACEs science
YMCA Marin County Youth Court in San Rafael, California In her opening statement, 17-year-old youth advocate Eva advises jurors how to proceed and summarizes her “client’s” good qualities. “As you will see, Julian is genuine, well-spoken and friendly. I recommend asking him about his friends and family, his future plans and his activities outside of school.” (First names only of all minors are used to protect their privacy.) Welcome to the YMCA Marin County (CA) Youth Court, one of 1,400...
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Solano County launches its ACEs and resilience initiative inviting all to take action
Elizabeth Huntley recalls the day when her family’s life was turned upside down. “One day my mom woke up and she packed up all of our clothes, all five of us…and she took me and my younger sister who had the same father… down to my paternal grandmother’s house…and she left us there. She took my middle sister to a town near Birmingham, Ala., and left her there. She took my only brother and an older sister back to Huntsville and left them at a sister’s house. Then she went back to that housing...
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Spirituality in Post-Traumatic Growth
One of the five domains of post-traumatic growth is spirituality. Helping us understand the role of spirituality in recovering from trauma at the Echo Frontiers of Resilience conference is Shaun Tomson . If you think the name and face look familiar then perhaps you know him from his days as a world champion surfer. Shaun needed every single one of the lessons he had learned about facing challenges in the form of towering waves and overcoming wipe-outs when he lost his 15-year-old son to a...
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Screening for Childhood Trauma
Dr. Ken Epstein has been in the social services sector for nearly four decades and has witnessed firsthand the long-term effects of trauma. As both the son and father of fellow social workers, the work runs in his blood. Now, he’s helping Bay Area health clinics screen for and address childhood trauma through the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative (RBC), led by Center for Care Innovations (CCI) and made possible by Genentech.
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The Department of Health Services is tracking racial / ethnic demographic data for COVID-19 positive cases in County
Susan Gorin @susangorin1st Impacts on the Latinx Community There are long-standing injustices that have led to this, and this moment offers the opportunity to take concerted action to overcome inequalities and transform our thinking and actions towards a "stronger for all" Sonoma county. The health differences between the racial and ethnic groups are rooted in unequal economic and social conditions, as well as in past and current structural inequalities and discrimination that marginalize...
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The Economics of Child Abuse: A Study of California
While the impact of maltreatment on a child and their family is devastating, child maltreatment also has serious effects far beyond those for the victim. Maltreatment results in ongoing costs to taxpayers, institutions, businesses, and society at large. Local communities bear the brunt of these costs in the form of medical, educational, and judicial costs, though more tragic signs are seen in homelessness, addiction, and teen pregnancy. To create a concrete understanding of the widespread...
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Their Kids Died on the Psych Ward. They Were Far From Alone, a Times Investigation Found [latimes.com]
By Soumya Karlamangla, Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2019 Mia St. John’s cellphone lit up with a message from the psychiatrist treating her son. The voicemail shimmered with hope, the first she had felt in months. The doctor said Julian, admitted to a psychiatric facility with schizophrenia, seemed more cheerful, was talking more with other patients and would soon begin a new art project. “Very happy to see he’s coming around a bit,” the doctor said. It was November 2014, and Julian, 24,...
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Dozens of stakeholders representing thousands of practitioners send public comments on Calif. ACEs-screening plan
Update: We posted this story on Tuesday evening and received a response from the Department of Health Care Services Wednesday that clarifies additional information. DHCS information Officer Katharine Weir said that subject to budget approval by the legislature and the governor: The reimbursement rate will be $29. Federally Qualified Health Centers will also be reimbursed for screening pediatric patients for trauma through Prop 56 funds and federal matching funds. In response to a question...
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Early Discount 20th Annual Families & Fathers Conference
Call to action- Fathers and Families Coalition of America is nearing the 20th Annual Families and Fathers Conference, March 4-7, 2019 in Los Angeles, California with a comprehensive program that hosts presenters from the United Kingdom, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Bolivia and throughout the United States. We are providing the conference information for your consideration to participate. We are asking you to share this conference information with your community...
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'Essential' Or Not, These Workers Report For Duty [californiahealthline.org]
By Heidi de Marco, California Healthline, April 1, 2020 WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Pauline Lawrence is 63, an age that puts her at increased risk if she contracts COVID-19. Yet, three days a week, she spends 16 hours with someone at even greater risk: a 97-year-old man who depends on her and two other home health aides to survive. “Somebody has to take care of him,” said Lawrence, an immigrant from Jamaica who lives with her 30-year-old son in a South Los Angeles apartment. “I will stand up to...
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Fearing Deportation, Parents Worry About Undocumented Kids In Medi-Cal [California Healthline]
Luz felt relieved and grateful when she learned that her 16-year-old son qualified for full coverage under Medi-Cal. Now, she worries that the information she provided to the government health program could put her family at risk of deportation. Luz’s son is one of nearly 190,000 children who have enrolled in Medi-Cal since California opened it to undocumented children last year. Luz, her husband and her son came to Merced, Calif., from Mexico without papers about 10 years ago. Luz asked...
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LA’s At-Risk Youth Need Community Resources & Healing, Not Punishment & Pepper Spray [witnessla.com]
WitnessLA, June 5, 2019. From juvenile hall to county jail to prison to deportation, I’ve experienced first-hand the lifelong obstacles that contact with the criminal justice system can produce. As a troubled youth in the mid to late 1980s, I found that my time in LA County Probation’s juvenile halls and camps provided few resources or guidance to change my negative behavior. Instead, I learned better ways to defend myself against other troubled, gang-involved youth. It was gladiator school,...
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Mental Health Care Could Get Easier for New Moms Under New California Rules [capradio.org]
By Sammy Caiola, Capital Public Radio, December 18, 2019 When Susan Yee Kearns brought her son home from the hospital a year and a half ago, she started worrying about him almost immediately. She woke up thinking he might have died. She was afraid to be away from him. “There was a lot of anxiety,” the Sacramento mom said. So she sought mental health help through her Medi-Cal insurance. But Yee Kearns' provider told her that Medi-Cal would only cover 60 days of treatment. When it was over,...
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OCAP needs you! Apply now to become a member of their 2019 Citizen Review Panels
Make a difference in the lives of vulnerable children in California. Use your voice to change the child welfare system in California! Convened by the Office of Child Abuse Prevention (OCAP), they are seeking citizen (YOUR) input at their quarterly meetings. Now is your chance to make recommendations to the State! Apply now t o become a member of the California Child-welfare Citizen Review Panels (CRPs). Meetings are held 4 times a year. Participation can be by phone, computer, or in-person.
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On Death Row, but Is He Innocent? [NYTimes.com]
One June day in 1983, a California professor drove over to a neighbor’s house to pick up his 11-year-old son from a sleepover. Nobody answered the door, so the professor peered through a window — and saw a ghastly panorama of blood. The professor found his son stabbed to death, along with the bodies of Peggy and Doug Ryen, the homeowners. The Ryens’ 10-year-old daughter was also dead, with 46 wounds, but their 8-year-old son was still breathing. This quadruple murder began a travesty that is...
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Parent and Youth Leaders Educate Policymakers on ACEs in Sacramento on July 11th
Twelve parent and youth leaders, reentry and educational leaders, and community organizers represented the region of San Diego in Sacramento on July 11th. Aligning with about 80 other community members and professionals statewide, everyone met with and educated legislative staff on the impact of ACEs, community trauma, community healing and resilience building. Organized by the 4CA steering group led by Center for Youth Wellness, Children Now, and ACEs Connection Network, the ACEs science...
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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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Parents’ status puts some children’s health care in jeopardy [San Francisco Chronicle]
On a recent rainy morning in Los Angeles, Maria Bernal’s stove clicks to life with a bright blue flame to toast bread on a griddle for her 9-year-old son, Edwin, to smear with peanut butter. As she scoops papaya chunks into the blender for a smoothie, she recalls her worry during all the years when she couldn’t afford health care and he suffered painful ear infections. The waiting six months to get an appointment for Edwin at a county facility. The nights trying to calm him as he cried in...
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Preparations begin for 2018 State Legislative Sessions—Tools to help you communicate with your state legislators
With the majority of states convening legislative sessions in 2018*, now is the time to begin preparations to advance trauma-informed proposals and educate lawmakers on the impact of trauma on the health and wellbeing of their constituents. ACEs Connection Network (ACN) will be sharing tools to help in this process over the next months. Two are now available—“How to Create a Community Profile” and “Tips on How to Build Relationships with Your Legislators.” One of the most effective tools...
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Registration Open - 2019 Families and Fathers Conference Early Rate and Hotel Discount Closing
In 48 days, we open our 20th convening of a powerful conference focused on strengthening families, improving outcomes for children, and strategies to engage families: the 20th Annual Families and Fathers Conference hosted by Fathers and Families Coalition of America. Sponsorships allow the extended early rate for an exceptional experience in Los Angeles, California, from March 4th (pre-conference institute credential) through the main conference dates of March 5th - 7th. Please share this...
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Report reveals how foster care, juvenile and adult justice systems traumatize youth, calls for policy shifts
YWFC sponsored Sister Warriors meeting When she was 15 years old, Lucero Herrera was put in a rehab program by San Francisco’s Juvenile Court because she was getting drunk regularly. And in doing so, the court failed to explore the root of her drinking. Had they done so, she said, they would have found that anger and trauma were lurking underneath, driven by her ACEs: adverse childhood experiences. Lucero Herrera "Why did they put me in a drug program when I had an anger problem? I went...
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Community Profiles from selected CA ACEs Initiatives and Programs
CA communities and organizations from across the state shared information about their trauma informed and resilience building initiatives at the Child Adversity Policymaker Awareness Day on July 11, 2017 in Sacramento. The event, organized by 4CA ( California Campaign to Counter Childhood Adversity) , educated state legislators about the impacts of child adversity across the lifecourse and strategies for preventing ACEs, healing trauma and creating resilient communities. A series of fourteen...
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Coronavirus ravages services for people with disabilities, leaving many at risk [calmatters.org]
By Dan Morain and Anita Chabria, Cal Matters, April 5, 2020 Sue Swezey, 83, has spent the last three weeks at home caring for her son John, who is 57 and severely autistic. John needs 24-hour supervision. He cannot cross a street safely. The other day, he used a metal fork to unstick a piece of bread stuck in an electric toaster. His mother rushed in to pull the plug. Before the coronavirus pandemic struck, John Swezey and people like him with intellectual and developmental disabilities...
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California’s big spending push for children could have national impact [EdSource]
By Zaidee Stavely, August 8, 2019 When her son Quincy was six weeks old, Lynette Stewart dropped him off at a child care center in Long Beach, California and headed back to work, with a hard ball of worry in her chest. “I cried my eyes out, especially that first week of leaving him there,” Stewart said. “No one wants to take their baby, who can’t communicate, to a stranger at that age.” At the time, in 2015, Stewart was working as an administrative assistant at a small company that made...
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Groundbreaking Mental Health Report Released (independent.com)
For the past nine years, Linda Orozco has been looking for the impossible in all the wrong places. Tuesday morning, she may have finally found what she’s been looking for. Since 2007, Orozco has sought help for her son, now 36, afflicted with the twin demons of schizophrenia and methamphetamine addiction. For the past three years, her son has been living on the streets. Orozco estimates he’s been arrested 20 times and committed to the county’s Psychiatric Health Facility ( PHF ) at least six...
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Habla Español? Hispanics Face Growing Mental Health Care Crisis [usatoday.com]
By Jared Weber, USA Today, July 18, 2019 It was soon after Jasmine Alcala gave birth to her son, Benjamin, that her mind flooded with thoughts of catastrophe. For Alcala, now 38, tragedy lurked everywhere. At her Long Beach, California, home, which she rarely left while caring for her newborn, she feared a home invasion. Behind the wheel, her heart raced at the possibility of a fatal car accident. At the grocery store, she fretted over the potential of armed robbery. And nothing was as...
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Homeless California Families get Help Finding Child Care [edsource.org]
By Zaidee Stavley, EdSource, September 3, 2019 For almost two years, Eva Morales moved from homeless shelter to homeless shelter. Sometimes she stayed with friends. On the worst nights, she slept in a friend’s car. It was hard for Morales, but harder for her two small children, who had to adapt with each move, only to be uprooted again soon after. Her son, who is now 4, angered easily. He didn’t want to play with his 2-year-old sister and he refused to eat most of the food at the shelter.
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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 Parents and Teachers Can Calm Kids' Getty Fire Anxiety [latimes.com]
By Sonali Kohli and Nina Agrawal, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2019 During this Santa Ana wind season, 12-year-old Nicholas Ladesich tends to go to bed worrying about what might burn overnight. He often has dreams of waking up in his old house that burned down in the Woolsey fire last year. But he awakens instead in the living room of the one-bedroom guest house he shares with his brother and parents. He demands that his mom turn on the news to monitor possible fires while his 15-year-old...
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In Spanish: Handouts for parents about ACEs, toxic stress & resilience
The Community & Family Services Division at the Spokane (WA) Regional Health District has come through again, with a Spanish version of the parent handout (in English) that we posted last year , and which has been downloaded thousands of times. The English versions came about whiledoing a story about the trauma-in formed elementary schools in Spokane, WA .I interviewedp ublic health nurse Melissa Charbonneau who said that she'd been giving an...
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I found my voice and I am going to use it
People are angry. Angry about institutional racism, angry about racial profiling, angry about police brutality, and angry about so many other displays of inequity that are happening in our country. People of color have always been marginalized in our society and people of all colors are finally saying enough is enough.
Comment
Re: ACEs Champion Dana Kwitnicki — An ACEs Tale of Two Counties
The first sentence in paragraph 10, "If the ACEs screen is not part of a routine visit, they might be undiagnosed for years," suggests the critical importance of a comprehensive medical history, gathered routinely . Ordinarily this is avoided because it is so time consuming, hence costly, and mostly does not seem to relate to the symptom bringing patients in. In my former Department of Preventive Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, we circumvented this by having patients fill out our...
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UCSF study shows health workers grappling with pandemic anxiety: 'It's exhausting' [sfchronicle.com]
By Mallory Moench, San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 2020 Dr. Robert Rodriguez’s anxiety rises and falls with the number of coronavirus cases and deaths. Fear that he could get infected at his San Francisco General Hospital job, or bring the virus home, affects his sleep. He doesn’t hug his 16-year-old son as much. Other worried family members avoid interacting with him. The stress isn’t sustainable, he said. “If day after day, you’re waking up and dealing with patients that are extremely...
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Child Life specialists empower kids in hospitals, disasters and now the pandemic
In late May, Betsy Andersen’s 7-year-old son, Ezra, had a serious meltdown. He and his six-year-old sister Abby had been enjoying an online Zoom interaction with “Miss Eileen,” “Miss Savannah,” a couple of their colleagues, and a puppet. Betsy Andersen “I could see him trailing off and then he started crying,” says Andersen, who lives in Mundelein, Illinois. But before she swooped in, she heard Miss Eileen talking to him: “She was saying ‘Hey, I see you’re having some big emotions.” Speaking...
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This wasn't the first time
Going out to buy groceries, going out for a walk, driving your kid back home from school. For most people these activities are normal, everyday things with little to no excitement, as they should be. Unfortunately, getting food, exercising, and supporting my son’s education have been a little more out of the ordinary for me. You see, I am a Mexican Indigenous man, brown skin, shaved head. My ethnicity and physical appearance are by no means unusual, especially in the part of the country...
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Exclusive: More than 1,600 Californians have been evicted during pandemic [calmatters.org]
By Matt Levin, Nigel Duara, and Erica Yee, Cal Matters, August 11, 2020 Like any parent, Jamie Burson didn’t want her 11-year-old son to discover how frightened she really was about the novel coronavirus. But it’s hard to mask anxiety when you’re living and sleeping together in the same car. After Burson was evicted from her two bedroom apartment in Vacaville the second week of April, she heeded Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order to shelter in place by cooping up in a two-door sedan near her Walmart...
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Saving Black Youth [ssir.org]
By Elena Sheppard, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2020 On June 9, 2016, 19-year-old Deston “Nutter” Garrett was shot in his home in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, California. He had a friend over, and they got into a fight over a YouTube video. “Nutter thought of this friend as a big brother, and I thought of him as my son,” says Garrett’s mother, Tanya Bean-Garrett. “It was an argument that went bad, and my son got the worst end of it.” Nutter died two days later in the...
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Where Do I Go?
“If he wins I'm going to Canada.” ”I need to find and marry someone with E.U. citizenship.” “I'm going to apply for grad school in one of the Scandinavian countries!” “My family always kept dual citizenship, just in case we ever needed it.” These are just a few of the comments I have heard when people contemplate what they’ll do if Donald Trump wins the 2020 election. I would be dishonest if I said that leaving the United States had not crossed my mind. After all, I want to provide my...
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Glendale confronts its racist past, apologizing for 'sundown' laws [latimes.com]
By Lila Seidman, Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2020 When Tanita Harris-Ligons moved to Glendale in 2008, she said locals kept asking her where she was visiting from. “If you’re Black, they didn’t believe you lived there,” she said of the city that was once a bastion for white supremacy groups and a so-called sundown town, where Black people weren’t welcome after dark . About two years later, her son, Jalani, started middle school in the city, and the children began to separate along racial...
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'I don’t know how we can really achieve racial equity if we’re not hearing the voices of those whom we hope to serve'
Dr. Shandi Fuller recalls that when she first assembled an all-staff meeting at the Solano County Family Health Services to show how equity and ACEs screening should go hand in hand, some staff members were bewildered. “Why are we talking about equity?” they asked. As Fuller explained to attendees at “A Better Normal,” an ACEs Connection webinar on Oct. 13, the question led her and a colleague to develop training for medical providers on this concept. The webinar was also based on extensive...
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How Families Are Fighting Racism and Disability Discrimination [calhealthreport.org]
By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, California Health Report, November 9, 2020 Ever since her son, Landon, was born three years ago, Nakenya Allen has been fighting. Fighting to get a diagnosis for the cause of Landon’s digestive problems, which landed him in the emergency room multiple times before he turned 18 months old. Fighting to get doctors to take her concerns about her son’s constant distress seriously. And, after he was diagnosed with a rare birth defect in his spinal cord, fighting with...
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Finding joy amid tragedy, California families look ahead with hope [edsource.org]
By EdSource Staff, Edsource, December 18, 2020 Even in the most frustrating, hopeless, boring, grief-filled days of the pandemic, California families found slivers of joy. In Los Banos, the Ruiz and Gutierrez family played indoor badminton and learned American Sign Language together. In the Lucerne Valley, 8-year-old Colton Reichow careened over the desert hills on his dirt bike and learned how to butcher a cow at his grandfather’s farm. In Los Angeles, Shari Abercrombie found a way to make...