By Jackie Botts and Felicia Mello, Cal Matters, November 6, 2019 A college student in Fresno who struggles with hunger has applied for food stamps three times. Another student, who is homeless in Sacramento, has applied twice. Each time, they were denied. A 61-year-old in-home caretaker in Oakland was cut off from food stamps last year when her paperwork got lost. Out of work, she can’t afford groceries. While picking up a monthly box of free food, a 62-year-old senior in San Diego told...

CAREgivers film will be airing on most public television stations around the US beginning this month in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orlando, Cleveland, Spokane, Boise, Springfield-Holyoke, Youngstown, Idaho Falls, Twin Falls, Fairbanks, ETC. Please check your local public TV stations for future dates and times. Broadcast times will also be posted in advance whenever possible at: http://caregiversfilm.com/screenings/see-the-film/ This documentary addresses secondary trauma (aka...

Dr. Elizabeth Grady is a pediatrician at the South San Francisco Clinic, a community clinic of San Mateo Medical Center. She and Susana Flores , a senior public health nurse with San Mateo County Health, spoke with me about how the clinic and other health agencies in San Mateo have been able to craft ways to work together to prevent and heal toxic stress in children. Grady also talked about how she and Flores have been working with the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative (RBC), a group of...

Last Friday, on a sunny Spring day in Santa Clara, CA, about 100 people gathered to celebrate a milestone: Over the last 10 months, 65 trainers from Trauma Transformed, a regional trauma-informed center and clearinghouse in the San Francisco Bay Area, have educated 4,048 people in six counties about trauma-informed principles and practices.

In 2015, 5,545 children in San Francisco, CA, were reported to have experienced abuse. Of those, the reports of 753 children were substantiated. The expense to San Francisco for not preventing that abuse will cost $400,533 per child over his or her lifetime. That adds up to $301.6 million for just that one year, according to “ The Economics of Child Abuse: A Study of San Francisco.” And, because child abuse is profoundly underreported, the costs are likely to be as much as $5.6 billion/year,...

Here is a roundup of a few articles by experts in various fields that provide context and detail to the understanding that child separations are more than a saddening inconvenience- they are detrimental to the emotional and physical well-being of young people.

How do you build a narrative around ACEs science, bolster it with data and convince your leadership that integrating it is critical for the community you serve? Representatives from San Francisco Bay Area health and social service agencies had an opportunity on December 5 to learn about ACEs science, find data sets to help them make a case for supporting ACEs education and resiliency programs, and then role play ways to deliver powerful messages. Donielle Prince, ACEs Connection Network’s...

By Erica Hellerstein, Cal Matters, January 17, 2020 A new Alameda County program focused on the connections between poverty, food and employment opened Friday morning, the latest in a countywide effort to help low-income residents by increasing access to jobs and fresh produce. The newly built, 3,300-square-foot space will provide a commercial kitchen for small, home-based food entrepreneurs, land to grow fresh produce and a place to package leftover food retrieved from some local schools to...

Tufts University medical professor Dr. Robert Sege directs the Center for Community-Engaged Medicine and is nationally known for his research on effective health systems approaches that address social determinants of health. He is also the principal investigator for the HOPE framework (Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences).The HOPE framework is based on research that shows how positive childhood experiences can mitigate the effects of adverse childhood experiences. Sege and colleagues...

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.

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...

In the first of a series of planned screenings of the film Resilience , the Santa Clara ACEs Connection community offered a panel led discussion about how to bring trauma informed practice and resilience building to the entire county. Rhoda Blankenship, Director of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health for County Public Health Department, emceed the event, along with Andrew Cain, both of whom sit on the Santa Clara community collaborative steering committee. Following opening remarks by...

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...

In a house called “Johanna’s House” on a tree-lined side street in Vallejo, Calif., four women are filling out the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) survey given to them by Maria Guevara, the founder of Vallejo Together, an organization that serves homeless residents in Vallejo. The house was named for Johanna Dilag, a homeless woman who was found dead along with her dog.

Over 130 residents from across the San Francisco Bay Area representing education, health, and law enforcement attended the sold-out screening of Paper Tigers and panel on December 9 at the Brower Center in Berkeley, CA. The panel discussion was so involved it went 25 minutes longer than scheduled and spilled into the lobby where attendees talked until 10 pm! The documentary Paper Tigers follows six students during a school year at Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA. Lincoln is the...

Armon Hurst, 2nd from left, first row, Teens on Target, courtesy of YouthAlive! Eighteen-year-old Armon Hurst serves as vice president of the student body at Castlemont High School in Oakland, Calif. He has a 4.0 grade point average, is an avid baseball player, and is slated to go to college next year. But until a few years ago, Hurst would find himself waking from nightmares in the middle of the night. It was difficult to concentrate at school, and he wasn’t eating well. Armon Hurst “There...

Bridge Housing Corporation and Health Equity Institute, San Francisco, CA Federal housing programs such as HOPE VI and CHOICE Neighborhoods mandate community leadership as integral revitalization efforts and have institutionalized this...

Nearly 300 impassioned and committed people crowded into the Green Room at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center last week to launch Trauma Transformed. Known as T2, the regional effort representing the San Francisco...

Isn't that the most encouraging headline? Isn't that a wonderful photo? Too few articles about ACEs offer any hope about what can help. For so long, researchers, writers and activists have been trying to make the point and "prove" that ACEs matter, ACEs matter and oh yeah, ACEs really really do matter! There has been too little focus (and funding) on what can be done to counter the impact of ACEs, in general, as well as for parents, in particular. That's starting to change, in no small part,...

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...

Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic: One-Pager

In the spring of 1982, Susan Burton turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with the death of her 5-year-old son, who had run into the street and was hit by a vehicle driven by an off-duty police officer . Over the course of the next 17 years, Burton was in and out of prison. “Each time I left, I felt a little more broken,” she told me recently. What would have made a difference, she said, was “if there could have been a way to have therapy from traumatic childhood events, disappointments and...

California can support children and youth by tackling the state’s — and the country’s — legacy of White supremacy and replacing it with a trauma-informed approach of love, empathy, and support.

English: The California Department of Public Health, Injury and Prevention Branch (CDPH/IVPB) and the California Department of Social Service, Office of Child Abuse Prevention’s (CDSS/OCAP) , Essentials for Childhood (EfC) Initiative , ACEs Connection , and the Yolo County Children’s Alliance co-created “Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic” in both English and Spanish. This material is intended for Californian families experiencing the severe economic consequences resulting from...

In a recent nightmare, 8-year-old Jovina dreamt that her father got COVID-19. He was getting sicker, but she and her mother weren’t able to get there in time. “There,” in her father’s case, is a cell at the California Correctional Center (CCC) in Susanville, California, nearly 300 miles from where she lives in San Jose. In Jovina’s mind are a swarm of worries about her father’s welfare, her mother Benee Vejar reports. If an earthquake shakes the Bay Area, Jovina says, “What if the building...

Nationally recognized days of awareness remind us of important civil and human rights movements led by Black and African-American communities and social justice advocates. February puts leadership, education, access, justice, policy, and governance under the spotlight. Through a PACEs science lens, this month is an opportunity to consider trauma-informed transformation through a PACEs science lens as the way forward.

March marks the final month of the granting period for the CRC Accelerator. Here are the next steps for certification or a certificate of participation.