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For generations travelers have understood the importance of always knowing the location of the North Star. As the only fixed point in the night sky, the North Star is a constant companion and a sure reference for setting one’s course on a journey. For TCE's Building Healthy Communities Initiative, we too are setting our North Star that will guide our BHC work over the next half of the initiative. Our North Star Goals and Indicators illustrate what success looks like in 2020. Essentially, the...

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to diversify the pool of doctors working at county hospitals, trauma centers and health care facilities. Supervisor Hilda Solis proposed coordinating with labor unions to recruit more culturally and linguistically competent physicians to staff the second largest municipal health care system in the nation. By ensuring that our physicians are as diverse as the patients they see, we place a strong emphasis on effective and...

Research on trauma is frequently featured in mainstream news outlets, pointing to its connection to a range of behavioral and health outcomes. While trauma can have multiple interpretations, for the purposes of this report, it is the result of experiencing or witnessing chronic and sustained violence, or specific events that can have lasting effects on individuals. Researchers have identified 13 distinct types of trauma, including community violence. Community violence is an umbrella term...

No matter where you are, be sure to follow the events of the day on twitter: Follow @acestoohigh and #4CAKidsDay17 to get live updates all day.

Here in Los Angeles County, the extreme shortage of early learning opportunities for children, prenatal to age 5, is an urgent issue. According to the L.A. County Child Care Planning Committee's most recent State of Early Care and Education in Los Angeles County report , 59 percent of preschoolers lack access to state-subsidized early learning opportunities; and 87 percent of working parents with infants and toddlers lack access to a licensed child-care center seat of any kind. The $183...

When people think of us, many envision a wealthy beach community dotted with hip boutiques and bistros overlooking beautiful sunsets. But here in Santa Monica we face stark, complicated issues—including homelessness—like any other city. In fact after seven years of stability, our homeless population spiked significantly this year (2017) to 921. This is a 26 percent increase over 2016. It’s part of a regional homelessness crisis in Los Angeles County , which also saw a 23 percent increase...

Nearly $36 million will flow into L.A. County to fight recidivism over the next few years, money all saved by sending fewer people to prison for drug and property crimes. California voters passed Proposition 47 in 2014, downgrading many drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, meaning offenders would no longer go to state prison. The authors of the initiative promised that it would yield savings from the state an that the money would be reinvested in programs designed to cut...

The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year. Gov. Jerry Brown ’s spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding...

Marbella Munoz was a foster child for most of her life. As is true for many foster children bounced through multiple placements, she was frequently forced to change schools. Despite the repeated changes, Munoz said she managed to keep up her grades. When she was 17, school administrators told her she had been referred to a program called “school-based supervision.” The “supervision” was not provided by a school guidance counselor or a teacher but by a juvenile probation officer. [For more of...

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) is seeking individuals who have experienced homelessness to join an advisory group. About 25 people will be invited to join the Lived Experience Advisory Group, a committee to help inform the programs and services being developed by the city and county to address homelessness. The agency is seeking a diverse set of individuals that can represent different experiences of homelessness. They want diversity in the geographic representation and...

As a movement has taken hold to get California’s jails and prisons to operate more efficiently while releasing inmates who are better able to successfully reenter society, there have been occasional steps in the opposite direction. One of the most destructive has been a trend to ban in-person visits by family and friends. Some county jails have gone as far as eliminating visitation rooms, where higher-security inmates speak on phones to their visitors while seeing them, face-to-face, through...

Los Angeles Unified School Board members have clarified what staff on the district's campuses are supposed to do if federal immigration agents show up at their campus. In February 2016, when they declared L.A. Unified campuses as immigration "safe zones," the board had already directed school employees to alert district higher-ups of any request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. But in case the implication wasn't already clear, board members passed a resolution Tuesday...