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Rep. Jeff Boatman, R-Tulsa, filed two bills to provide mental health resources and training for students and educators. House Bill 1568 would add mental health instruction to health education curriculum. Starting in the 2022-2023 school year, the State Board of Education would collaborate with the Oklahoma Dept. of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS) to adopt standards and approve age-appropriate curriculum options for students in grades kindergarten through 12. Boatman said...

On Thursday, January 28, at the first monthly meeting of 2021 for the Oklahoma Self-Healing Community (SHC) teams, members participated in a workshop on Logic Modeling. The workshop was led by Dr. Mike Stout, Associate Professor with the OSU-Tulsa Center for Public Life , with assistance from graduate research assistants Patrick Grayshaw and Carly Dunn. Participants included team members from several of the 20 SHCs teams who participated in the October 2019 workshop led by Laura Porter...

The Potts Family Foundation through its Raising Resilient Oklahomans initiative partnered this past week with the Ardmore Behavioral Health Collaborative and Ardmore Literacy Leadership to host a very successful virtual screening and discussion of the award-winning documentary Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope. As we always do, the weekend screening period was followed by a moderated panel discussion of professionals, mostly local, who frequently work with children...

It's now well known that childhood experiences helps shape an individual’s personality long before they reach adulthood. Studies have also gone on to reenforce just how critical adverse childhood experiences can on an adult's health. These adverse childhood experiences are commonly referred to as ACEs. They fall into three categories: abuse, neglect and household disfunction. According to information compiled by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as the number of ACEs a child experiences...

I'm pretty sure I learned as much or more about trauma-informed policing while presenting the class as did the police chiefs who attended. After not presenting at all during 2020, I was excited to be invited to present a block of instruction on Trauma-Informed Leadership for Police Chiefs at the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police 2021 Winter Conference. There were about 50 chiefs in attendance on January 14, 2021, and while we all had to deal with the COVID precautions, it was good...

By Center for Care Innovations, January 15, 2021 The Resilient Beginnings Network at CCI recently screened Resilience: The Biology of Stress and The Science of Hope a documentary by the late James Redford, a film that traces the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and resilience. As the makers of Resilience explain, “Toxic stress can trigger hormones that weak havoc on the brains and bodies of children, putting them at a greater risk for disease, homelessness, incarceration, and...

Trauma impacts lives on the individual, familial, community and societal level. Historically, we have addressed the resulting symptoms of trauma with treatments of therapy, education, and all too often imprisonment. However, putting preventative factors in place can avert the symptoms, outcome and resulting negative impacts. Prevention begins with understanding how trauma impacts lives and why it impacts our brains and bodies before we can fully understand what we can do to mitigate its...

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2020 Kids Count report, released Tuesday, states that “schools have been disrupted so profoundly (by the COVID-19 pandemic) that the effects could damage the prospects of an entire generation of young people.” The COVID-19 pandemic is having an “outsized” impact on children and communities of color, with a new report indicating that roughly 1 in 3 Oklahoma households with children expressed some belief in October that they would experience an eviction or...

Three years ago, the Potts Family Foundation began a journey like nothing we had pursued before. We purchased a license to show the documentary "Resilience - The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope." The film defines adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress, and explains the impact on the human brain, especially in early childhood. Since October 2017, we have shown the film 204 times to more than 13,000 Oklahomans. PFF is a dual-missioned, private family foundation...

In a new book, Scotland After The Virus, edited by Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow, some of Scotland’s leading thinkers, writers and commentators contemplate the Covid pandemic and what it means for our future IN the winter of 1944, Nazi forces cut off food supplies to the Netherlands. Famine ensued, with people reduced to eating tulip bulbs, including mothers-to-be carrying babies yet unborn. Luckily, the famine was short-lived, although not before 20,000 people died. It ended when Allied...

We know from history that traumatic experiences in childhood can have long-lasting effects, impacting both the physical body and our mental health. Research has shown that these stressful experiences in life can also impact the offspring of individuals whom have endured trauma. This contradicts some of the basic underpinnings of genetic hereditary. How can experiences in life affect our gametes – the sperm and egg cells – which pass on hereditary information through DNA to our offspring?

Raising a child can be hard at any age. Doing so in one’s golden years during a global pandemic introduces an array of unique challenges. Mel Hannah spent most of his life in service to others. He was the first African American member of the Flagstaff City Council and vice chairman of the NAACP Arizona State Conference. And, in service to his beloved family, Mel and his wife Shirley, now in their 80s, have been helping their daughter Ashley raise her three children these past years. Sadly,...