Julie Kurtz hasn’t stopped creating ways to build and promote resilience in herself and others who have experienced trauma since she left her family home for college at age 18. Although she experienced four types of adversity during her childhood, the CEO of the Center for Optimal Brain Integration has traveled a complex journey to mitigate those adversities by recognizing her own internal resilience, building skills to buffer her toxic and traumatic stress, uncovering her voice through...

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare providers everywhere are changing how they care for their patients. I asked a few members of the ACEs in Pediatrics community what they’re doing differently. Dr. R.J Gillespie, pediatrician at The Children’s Clinic in Portland, OR. Dr. R.J. Gillespie Gillespie says that, as much as possible, they’re switching to virtual visits, which allows them “to comfort and reassure our patients face-to-face as much as possible without risking their...

Dr. Angela Bymaster, a family physician at Washington Elementary School in San Jose, CA, operates her clinic in a portable unit on the school property. Because the unit faces students as they are dropped off by their families, she gets to “pick up the kids” before they are sent to the clinic, practicing “upstream medicine.”

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...

By Bay City News and Mountain View Voice Staff, Mountain View Voice, December 11, 2019 Santa Clara County Supervisors Tuesday allocated $200,000 to a new pilot program to help domestic violence victims whose partner tried to strangle them. The county will partner with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office and the Santa Clara Police Department to respond to victims who are 12 years old and older. Law enforcement officers will ask victims if they consent to a hospital visit, and will be...

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.

Photo by Terabass/ CC-SA-3.0 It was around 2010 that Dr. Angela Bymaster was seeing a disturbing pattern in the histories of her adult patients. She already knew that patients who saw her at the Valley Homeless Health Care Program in San Jose, CA, where she worked at the time, were homeless or recently homeless. What was most troubling to Bymaster was knowing that their current precarious existence could have been prevented. Dr. Angela Bymaster “Over and over and over again I was hearing the...

From Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center: Our four-part series of race equity and COVID-19’s impact will conclude with a free virtual dialogue centering on Native American communities. As of mid-April, the health authority for the Navajo Nation, which includes areas of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, reported 1,197 positive coronavirus cases and 44 deaths. If it were a state, it would rank third in the country for confirmed cases per 100,000 people behind only New York and New Jersey,...

By Erin Allday, San Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 2020 Six Bay Area counties are expected to announce a “shelter in place” order for all residents on Monday, directing everyone to stay inside their homes and away from others as much as possible for the next three weeks as public health officials desperately try to curb the rapid spread of coronavirus across the region. County authorities were expected to announce the move at 1 p.m. and gave a draft of the order to media outlets to prepare.

Hi, Everyone: Here’s the state profile for California. To review the entire profile, open the PDF that is attached to this post. If you have corrections or additions, please leave them in the comments section of this post. We’ll be reviewing the comments regularly and doing fact-checks. The information you give us will also help us determine how to organize and expand the information in the state profiles. We will be turning this post into a living profile that, with your help and input,...

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris presented today at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center during Pediatric Grand Rounds to a full room (standing room only) of pediatricians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, public health professionals and allied medical staff. With the show of hands, many of us in the room were familiar with ACEs science and the health impacts of toxic stress. With ease, Dr. Burke Harris dove into great detail of our bodies response to toxic stress and the multitude of...

Dr. Angela Bymaster, a family doctor in San Jose, Calif., was determined to find a way to teach ACEs science to her patients. Teens would come to the Washington Neighborhood Clinic clearly depressed by a range of problems at home that were contributing to risky sexual behavior and marijuana use, as well as preventable health problems like extreme obesity.

October 27, 2018 8:45 AM 5:00 PM PDT Calling all health care providers! Save the date! Saturday October 27th, 2018 Join The Center for Nature and Health and Primary Care Clinic, UCSF Benioff's Children's Hospital: When: Saturday, October 27th, 2018, 8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. (Outdoor time included!) Where: CHORI Library, 5700 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland, Ca Register now: www.bitly.com/ucsf- nature2018 Featured speakers: Daphne Miller, MD, Physician and author Jose Gonzalez, Founder, Latino...

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...

ACEs Connection will begin highlighting ACEs and Resilience initiatives by county. We're starting this effort off by listing the recent ACEs Aware grantees by county.

By Louise Hansen, July 15, 2020, Mercury News. The Bay Area is the least affordable region in the country for low- and moderate-income renters, with San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties topping the list, according to a new report. Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa counties also remain among the top 10 most income-stressing spots in the country, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. [ Please click here to read more. ]

From Get Healthy San Mateo County: The combination of the public health crisis and economic downturn has put significant strains on local jurisdictions’ budgets. These challenges have also brought to the forefront and exacerbated existing inequities among different races and ethnicities in our community, carrying disproportionate impacts for Blacks, Pacific Islander and Latinx residents. As jurisdictions continue to face challenges caused by COVID-19 and the economic recession, there is a...

We are excited to announce our new brief jointly released by BARHII and the Public Health Alliance of Southern California titled “ Embedding Equity into Emergency Operations: Strategies for Local Health Departments During COVID-19 & Beyond. ” The brief outlines case studies, resources, and priority recommendations that counties and cities can take to explicitly and intentionally embed equity staff and practices into their emergency operations structures and throughout the public health...

As the COVID-19 pandemic began its devastating sweep through African American communities in April, Andre Chapman, CEO of the San Jose, California-based Unity Care , saw a glaring need for developing a COVID-19 prevention campaign that spoke directly to African Americans. “Many of our young folks and families really didn't understand the impact of this virus, nor did they believe much of the information that was coming through the media,” says Chapman. His organization provides housing and...

Interested SF Bay Area safety net organizations can apply for funding to participate in this three-year program on resilience and trauma-informed care.

In the month of August 2020 , the Catalyst invites community-based providers and allied professionals to engage in generative dialogue about what this journey means and how to actualize this change – for a community to build a movement around a child, family, or individual once an ACE is identified – defining how we as a collective choose resilience as our pathway to healing. From these listening sessions , Catalyst staff will ask providers about their lived experiences as those at the...

September 2020 The health impacts of policing and incarceration are well documented. On average, 1,000 people are killed by police in the US each year, with Black and Indigenous people being 2 to 3 times more likely to be killed by police than White people. Even in the absence of physical violence, stops by police — or the constant threat of stops by police — are associated with adverse mental health outcomes , including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, especially for...

San Mateo County, CA — The Bay Area Geographic Leads Consortium, which consists of five Bay Area county offices of education, including the San Mateo County Office of Education, released a joint report with WestEd highlighting the needs of students experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. The white paper, Addressing the Needs of Students Experiencing Homelessness During the COVID-19 Pandemic , features promising strategies that schools in each county have put in place to provide...

Among PACEs Connection initiatives around the country, it’s well known that our social network is something like a bustling, giant town square where people share ideas, resources and any number of conversations about how to prevent childhood adversity and promote positive childhood experiences. On May 14, PACEs Connection assembled a virtual town square gathering of PACEs initiatives in California, where we have 58 initiatives sparking action all across the state. Speakers at the gathering,...