In October a video showing a senior deputy yank a student from her seat and flip her desk at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina went viral on the Internet. This incident gained wide national attention and demonstrates the need for...
In the first two parts of this series ( part one , part two ), we talk about the implications of trauma and student behavior and how to create a trauma informed school. The success of creating a trauma informed school weighs heavily on the school and community embracing the holistic approach. At Los Angeles Education Partnership, we achieve this through our Community School model. As former teachers, we are aware that the more we pile on our teachers, the less effective the approach becomes.
This article, written by Wendy Smith, addresses the challenges created by trauma, and why it's important to address these issues as early as possible. While the article focuses more on the role of social workers, parents, and foster care systems, this same information applies to anyone who works with children, regardless of where we have the opportunity to provide support. ~ Leisa Irwin, ACEs in Education group manager. What Children’s Brains Tell Us About Trauma: Invest Early, by Wendy...
Dulce Acosta, ACEs Connection Community Liaison, and Devika Shankar, Co-Chair of TIC Task Force of Greater Los Angeles Over two hundred individuals gathered last week at the University of Southern California's screening of the award-winning document film, Paper Tigers . Hosted by the USC School of Social Work, the screening was sponsored by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), USC Alumni, USC Career Development Department, and the Trauma Informed Care Task Force of Greater Los...
This year’s conference has something for everyone! Opening the conference, Echo’s Co-Executive Directors will be joined by some very special guests, including Anne Hudson-Price, an attorney from Public Counsel. Anne will be speaking about the legal action taken by Public Counsel to bring trauma-informed services to Compton School District. “You have to address trauma in order to do anything about the achievement gap,” she says in this article . In addition to featuring the Public Counsel,...
For years, Boyle Heights seemed a neighborhood cooped up in the still embryonic stage of gentrification, or "gentefication," a term coined to reflect change driven substantially by Latinos with roots in the Eastside neighborhood. Boyle Heights hasn't seen close to as much gentrification as Silver Lake and Highland Park, or even neighboring Lincoln Heights, with a mostly Mexican American community but more ethnic, racial and socioeconomic diversity and a bigger stock of wood-framed 19th and...
Director and producer Vic Compher’s documentary film, Portraits of Professional Caregivers: Their Passion. Their Pain , takes a deeper look at the causes of and treatments for what’s called secondary traumatic stress, a condition commonly...
Rosa Ana Lozada grew up on a two-block-long street in a San Francisco neighborhood pocked with trauma: domestic violence, child abuse, the frequent wail of police sirens. “It was unsafe to walk the two blocks to the bus stop,” she recalled. “In my community, we learned that police officers were not our friends because they were only seen when bad things happened.” For Lozada, now CEO of Harmonium, Inc., and a member of the San Diego Trauma Informed Guide Team, home and family were the...
Wisconsin elementary-school teachers are incorporating simple mental exercises in the classroom to promote well-being, thanks to a partnership between the Madison Metropolitan School District and the Center for Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The school's 5th graders recently made a music video for the song, "Don't flip yo' lid," by SF Bay Area hip hop artist, Just Me. The song's hook is, "mindfulness will change your life."
he waiting rooms for foster youths with nowhere else to go opened with great fanfare several years ago. Known as Youth Welcome Centers, they were hailed by Los Angeles County officials as an important way to address the chronic shortage of foster homes, especially for children hardest to place. They were the only facilities in the county system with a no-refusal policy and quickly became a place for youths who would otherwise be homeless. But in the next few days, the county plans to close...
Projected on the enormous screen at the front of the room was a blue-tinged image of a brain scan with a seemingly simple phrase next to it: Changing Minds. The striking image and accompanying messages are still being developed by national nonprofit Futures Without Violence (Futures) for a public outreach campaign about the complex issue of childhood trauma. Participants at the Changing Minds and Creating Trauma-Informed Communities convening, hosted by Futures in early February, got a...
The documentary, Paper Tigers, will be screened at USC on Thursday, March 3rd! USC's School of Social Work and the Trauma Informed Care Task Force of Greater LA are co-hosting the evening event. The evening begins at 5:00 pm with an hour of networking, followed by the film. After the film, a panel of people from the community, including task force members Emily Cummins Polk and K-Rahn Vallantine, will discuss the film. Paper Tigers follows six students through a year at Lincoln High School...
Created by Co-Chair of the Trauma Informed Care Task Force of Greater Los Angeles Devika Shankar, the infographic represents an evaluation survey distributed amongst the task force members in January, 2016 of their Strategic Planning Committee. Thank you Devika for capturing the survey results and creating a succinct and engaging infographic!
Image: Thank you to Los Angeles County Group member Olivia Piacenza for sharing the Collective Impact Forum link which guides the reader through the steps of Collective Impact succinctly. Another great tool available to you on your trauma informed, resilience building journey as we collaborate and ignite collective momentum. Please click on the link; http://collectiveimpactforum.org/what-collective-impact
Berkeley Media Studies Group facilitated a southern and northern California Strategic Communications Workshop in October 2015. Attached, please find their powerpoint, created by co-facilitators Julieta Kusnir and Pamela Mejia, titled "Talking about Trauma: Tips & Tools for Communicating Effectively" and "Blogging Tips for Media Advocates" articulating tips on content, headlines, length and tone of blogs.