Blog

By Renee Ryberg, Nadia Orfali Hall, Claire Kelley, Jessica Warren, and Kristen Harper, Child Trends, January 2020 In 2015, an average 15-year-old could expect to live to age 79. However, teens living in the 1 percent of neighborhoods with the lowest life expectancies could expect to live to 70—a lifespan nine years shorter. Educational attainment, a key social determinant of health, is one of the most powerful predictors of life expectancy. This association has strengthened over the past 20...

By Staff Reports, BlueRidgeNow.com, January 16, 2020 HCPS student services staff will offer Youth Mental Health First Aid USA and Trauma-Sensitive Schools training to community members for the second year in a row, and will also be expanding its reach and impact. Four trainings will take place on Saturdays in February, March and April, thanks to a state “Community Partners Safety Grant” secured by Henderson County Public Schools. Last April, HCPS offered YMHFA and TSS training to more than...

Byron Hall mentors adolescent parents for the Community Enrichment Organization , a nonprofit in Tarboro, NC, which partners with a program that supports to keep adolescent parents in school. One of the parents he mentors is 13 years old. At the age of 17, Hall was an adolescent parent himself, growing up with a single parent in the Bronx, NY, then an African American community where drug-dealing and prostitution were common. For the counselor, helping these young men and women, who are...

By Greg Barnes, North Carolina Health News, January 6, 2020 No one told Army veteran Carter Bryant about groundwater contamination near the Chemours Fayetteville Works plant when he bought a home there in July. Bryant said he knew almost nothing about GenX and other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — commonly known as PFAS or “forever chemicals” — before he and his family moved in. About two months later, Bryant said, he received a notice from Chemours stating that contaminants in his...

By Liora Engel-Smith, North Carolina Health News, December 20, 2019 An Eastern North Carolina hospital that stopped offering labor and delivery services earlier this year will no longer offer gynecological services for lack of staff. Martin General Hospital discontinued its maternity services at the end of October and said at the time that it would continue offering gynecological services at the hospital and in its clinic, Roanoke Women’s Healthcare. But the hospital’s two obstetricians...

This is a selection of reports collected and shared, with edited highlights, to raise awareness of the intersection between racism, trauma, and suicidality. Young Black People Are Killing Themselves The numbers are shocking. Young black people are making suicide attempts and dying by suicide at record high rates. A November 2019 Pediatrics study found the rate of suicide attempts for black youths shot up an alarming 73 percent from 1991 to 2017, while suicide attempts decreased 7.5 percent...

Benchmarks' Partnering For Excellence (PFE) 4th Annual Conference was held on Wednesday, September 11, 2019 and Thursday, September 12, 2019 at the Hawthorne Inn & Conference Center in Winston-Salem, NC. Over 175 participants from across North Carolina gathered to learn more about the long-term impacts of adversities. The audience was inspired by national and state leaders who shared ways to improve trauma-and-resiliency informed responses. The conference offered a variety of...

Last week, Benchmarks’ Partnering for Excellence partnered with American Children’s Home to host a free screening of the documentary Broken Places open to everyone in the community. Broken Places revisits three different families that were filmed 15-30 years ago to see how the toxic stress and trauma that they experienced has affected them over the years. It turns out that some people are very damaged by toxic stress and trauma, while others are able to thrive, and the film explores this...

Charlotte pilot program with Atrium Health and Novant Health supports state's goal to address social, economic and environmental health to improve child and family health outcomes The Center for Youth Wellness (CYW) announced it is partnering with two leading U.S. health systems in the Southeast to launch a screening program on childhood adversity. CYW's National Pediatric Practice Community (NPPC) has done on-site training at the headquarters of Atrium Health and Novant Health in Charlotte,...

Rowan County is excited to take the next steps across all sectors to foster a resilient community. We will be offering the Community Resiliency Model Trainer Training on January 27 th – 31 st , 2020. The location will be in downtown Salisbury at St. John’s Lutheran Church. Breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided for trainees for the entirety of the training. The Community Resiliency Model (CRM) of the Trauma Resource Institute trains community members to not only help themselves but to...

By Kayla Lasure, Watauga Democrat, November 20, 2019 Businesses could improve their reputation, culture, employee retention and employee wellness by implementing trauma-informed practices, according to Watauga Compassionate Compassionate Community Initiative Chair Denise Presnell. WCCI is a grassroots group created by volunteers with the goal of building a trauma-informed community. Presnell spoke on behalf of WCCI during a Nov. 15 Wake Up Watauga event hosted by the Boone Area Chamber of...

Nicole Wetsman The Red River runs north, up along the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, before spilling into Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Its water flows slowly through a 10,000-year-old glacial lakebed, in one of the flattest stretches of land in the United States, and because it points north, it’s sometimes blocked by ice jams—all of which makes the river prone to flooding . In March 2009, one such flood threatened the city of Fargo. Residents watched for a week as the...