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The state of Florida received a grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to implement Handle with Care in any Florida community that wants it. This grant includes training, resources, and technical support for both school districts and police departments as the program carries out. Initial funding to implement the program is vital because, once off the ground, upkeep for the program is inexpensive. The SAMHSA grant will only last for four more years,...

CTIPP CAN Call - Trauma-Informed Early Childhood Initiatives - September 15th, 2-3:30pm ET/11am-12:30pm PT - Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/742183645 Meeting ID: 742 183 645 One tap mobile +19292056099,,742183645# US (New York) Please join us for next week's CTIPP CAN Call, which will focus on building mental well-being for infants, toddlers and preschoolers and the adults who care for them. This month's presentation will feature Drs. Kaitlin Mulcahy and Gerry Costa, and Kelly...

By Alejandra Salgado, Cal Matters, August 23, 2021 This past school year, Madeline Waters struggled to find a way to pay for food while also studying for classes. As a nutrition major at Sacramento State, she wasn’t unfamiliar with what skipping meals could mean for her academic career. So this spring she applied, yet again, for food stamps. “I was really hungry, and my brain cells were barely functioning,” she said. “I was trying to get food and I’d fill out the paperwork and I was trying...

Following a brief mindfulness check-in, PACEs Connection staff meetings begin with the review of our Vision, Mission, and Values statements, as well as our Equity and Inclusion Statement. At a recent meeting, top row, L-R, Ingrid Cockhren, Carey Sipp, Donielle Prince, Jane Stevens. Middle row, L-R, John Flores, Porter Jennings-McGarity, Jenna Quinn, Gail Kennedy. Bottom row, L-R, Rafael Maravilla, Natalie Audage, Alison Cebulla, Samantha Sangenito. A couple of times last week I felt my body...

As we all know nearly two years into the pandemic, COVID-19 is a viral, respiratory disease easily transmitted through direct contact via respiratory droplets (Centers for Disease Control [CDC], 2021b). It has become a global pandemic that has had a large effect in the local community home to the University of Florida - Alachua County. Unfortunately, there are many risk factors put individuals at increased risk for severe COVID-19. One risk factor that many people are not aware of is...

The Returning to the Ranks (R2TR) program is a multi-phased program focused on readiness and reintegration of military members returning from combat deployments. R2TR seeks to not only help service members assimilate back into day-to-day life while simultaneously dealing with the aftereffects of combat stressors and ACEs, but also help families adjust to these members coming back as well. Additionally, with success of the first two phases, R2TR will reformat resiliency training on a much...

For my PHC6451 class, I created a hypothetical multi-level public health intervention, as the "Creative Director for ResilientU". This intervention is set to target individuals living in Jackson, Mississippi, the city with the highest obesity rates in the state of Mississippi and across the country (Oliver, 2017; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2019). Using the CDC's (2021) Social Ecological Model (SEM), I looked at each separate level (individual, relationship, community, and society) to...

The public health issue of concern is traumatic experiences specific to immigrant and refugee children under the age of seventeen, that negatively affect the neurology and development of these children. The target population for this analysis is immigrant children, specifically non-white immigrants and international refugees within the low socioeconomic realm. In 2016 alone, fifty million children were migrated or forcibly displaced (Wood, 2018). Yet, there is no existing literature on the...

The translation to the name of this resilience interventions is "Always Forward, Never Back" and the acronym SANA-- means HEAL. This intervention focus on building resilience within the Hispanic/Latino immigrant population in Immokalee, Florida of all ages. The rural town of Immokalee in South West Florida may look small, but it houses more than 20,000 farmworkers (Flocks, 2020). The farmworkers range in all ages, and many travel with their families. This community is also known to have...

This semester, my peers and I were tasked with creating a multi-level public health and resilience building intervention. We were to select a topic, target audience, and ensure it connected with the CDC social ecological model. I chose to focus on childhood food insecurity in Guilford County, NC. My intervention is titled "Growing Up". This intervention uses innovation and community collaboration to ensure every child has access to nutritious foods. The primary focus is to connect business...

Military spouses are an important part of the United States military services and essential to the Department of Defense (Keller et. al, 2018). A military spouse’s satisfaction in the quality of life afforded during their spouse’s service impacts service member retention rates (Lubens and Bruckner, 2018). Family dysfunction and distress can negatively impact a service member’s focus on the military mission and prevent deployment (Schneider and Martin, 1994). Military spouses are considered...

The LGBT Youth Teacher Training program aims to create a positive and safe school environment for LGBT youth. LGBT youth are disproportionately affected by suicide and poor mental health outcomes due to limited social support, isolation, and negative events rooted in bullying, homophobia, and transphobia (Siljestrom, 2021). Data has shown that LGBT students who did not believe that their school environment was safe often faced higher rates of bullying, no source of an adult role model who...