Signe Wilkinson
Our next COVID-19 "Better Normal" community discussion is Thursday, April 2, with Vic Compher and Rodney Whittenberg, producers of CAREGIVERS (Portraits of Professional CAREgivers: Their Passion, Their Pain).
These wonderful folks are bringing an entire team of people from the secondary traumatic stress committees from the Philadelphia ACE Task Force (PATF). They'll address the secondary traumatic stress (STS) issues that the ACEs Connection community is curious about, especially if they're caregivers, professional or not.
They've offered to talk about what they're doing to address the future, after COVID-19, which includes the Philadelphia Council's Resolution to OSHA, the Policy “Toolkit” Committee’s goal to promote staff resiliency programming in Philly through collaboration and provision of online resources, how they're engaging unions, and how they created their policy committees. And they'll address the now — how they're supporting professional caregivers through Zoom support sessions that will start next week.
Besides Rodney and Vic, others from the STS policy team include:
Laura Vega — co-chair (with Vic) of the Policy Toolkit committee — Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)
Carolyn-Smith Brown — Project Manager of the policy committees (staff of The Health Federation of Philadelphia)
Meghan Johnson — Philadelphia Child Advocacy Center
Meghan Gannon — Jefferson University Hospital and Medical School
Caroline Menapace and Kirsten Kohser — both also of CHOP
Nicole Fuller — Executive Director — PhilaPOSH
Betty Lee Davis — psychotherapist (primary author of the City Council Resolution)
They'll talk about some of their long-term plans to have secondary stress recognized as an occupational hazard, and their work during the COVID-19 pandemic to nurture professional caregivers who are serving families.
On Thursday, April 2, please join us here at 12 noon PT/ 1 pm MT/ 2 pm CT/ 3 pm ET:
Join Zoom Meeting (more info at bottom of post, with call-in numbers)
https://zoom.us/j/299661658
Meeting ID: 299 661 658
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March 26, 2020
We've got a name for our community discussion/brainstorming series!
We're calling it: A Better Normal.
Here's the reasoning. We really didn't like that "normal" didn't provide healthcare for everyone, required many parents to work two or three jobs to support their families and hardly ever spend time with their children, didn't provide enough family leave for parents to spend time with newborns or with ill children, left millions of people hungry, hundreds of thousands of people homeless, didn't provide equity in education, saddled a generation with an extreme burden of college debt, didn't provide enough economic support if you lost your job, and left millions looking at a future without hope of getting ahead, while the richest in our society kept getting richer.
So, we're going for a better normal that a lot of countries already have. The influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 killed 675,000 people in the U.S. and 50 million worldwide. Out of that catastrophe came a strong and remarkable public health and pandemic preparedness system that has decayed over the last couple of decades (although there was enough of the pandemic preparedness system to get us through this, if it had been used) , and left us scrambling. Just as our great-grandparents and grandparents survived and created a better normal for the public health system in 1920, we can take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic and create a better normal in healthcare, family services, public health, businesses, education, housing, etc. in 2020.
This ACEs Connection community is positioned to provide education about why integrating ACEs science can lead to a much better normal, as well as policies and practices based on ACEs science. Over the next two or three months, we'll explore many examples of a better normal so that we're ready to implement the best practices and policies on the other side of this pandemic.
So, ACEs Connection's A Better Normal convo for March 27 has a guest: Nada Yorke, Yorke Consulting, who's put together a great batterer's intervention course that integrates ACEs science. Here's a link to an article from 2017 about several people, including Yorke, who were integrating ACEs science into batterer interventions courses and providing an opening to drastically reducing domestic violence.
She'll give us details about how she developed the course, and the remarkable results she's seen. She'll also provide tips for helping families that are very stressed and may have been dealing with violence, emotional abuse, neglect and other issues before the COVID-19 outbreak, and now are struggling to survive indoors together.
Join Zoom Meeting (more info at bottom of post, with call-in numbers)
https://zoom.us/j/299661658
Meeting ID: 299 661 658
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Thursday, March 26, 2020: ACEs Connection's Cissy White will explain:
- What we are doing in our Parenting with ACEs, ACEs in Education and Practicing Resilience communities.
- How figuring out what support is right now is a challenge.
- How to grapple with anxiety, even though we know, with our knowledge about ACEs science, what’s happening, and how difficult it is to regulate.
Join Zoom Meeting (more info at bottom of post, with call-in numbers)
https://zoom.us/j/299661658
Meeting ID: 299 661 658
On Friday, Nada Yorke, who integrated ACEs science into her batterer's intervention course, will be here to talk with us.
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Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Register for the webinar, sponsored by the ACEs Aware Initiative.
Speakers include Edward Machtinger, MD, Alicia Lieberman, PhD, and Brigid McCaw, MD, MPH, MS, FACP
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Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Today, about 20 people participated in a great discussion about what several of us are doing, particularly in communities and families. We'll provide a link to the video and attach the chat in this post, when they're available, and figure out how to keep a running list of all the good ideas.
Last Friday, about 75 people gathered on a Zoom call — here's the video — to brainstorm about whether ACEs Connection should host a brainstorming/chat/hangout/informal webinar/community discussion a few days a week over the next few weeks.
The consensus was: Let's Do It! So we are.
Tuesday, March 24, 2020, at 12:00 PM Pacific/ 3:00 PM Eastern we'll convene again on a Zoom call (info below), to talk about what we've come up with so far, our plans for this week, and to get more feedback and ideas from you who attend.
Attached is the text chat, in case you want to read through it. There seemed to be great interest in how people are integrating ACEs science in domestic violence during these difficult times, as well as in child abuse, substance abuse and secondary trauma in first responders. I'm contacting some folks who can speak to those topics with an ACEs science lens.
Given the news, it looks as if we'll have plenty of chances to talk about topics, how this pandemic is adding a new approach to our work, and how we can take advantage of what we learn to create a more self-healing world.
btw, To remind us to take it easy...to be nice to ourselves...to realize that we're in for a long slog, but we'll get to the other side if we're patient and help each other, here's the tweet by Prof. Aisha Ahmad that I read on the call. It's her fabulous advice about productivity.
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Topic: ACEs Connection Community Discussion - COVID-19 Series
Time: Mar 26, 2020 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Mar 27, 2020 12:00 PM - Friday
Mar 31, 2020 12:00 PM - Tuesday
Apr 2, 2020 12:00 PM - Thursday
Apr 3, 2020 12:00 PM - Friday
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Meeting ID: 299 661 658
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