Blogs

Partner Showcase #3 - Michelle Higgins If compassionate police officers deserve purple hearts – what do trauma informed teachers deserve? A few weeks ago I posted an article titled Purple Hearts, Compassion and De-traumatizing. That article acknowledged Sergeant Braman for his heroic courage to exercise compassion in an often brutal world of law enforcement. There is no substitute for educating professionals who yield the power to transform our world into a safe place through compassion.

Hello all! The Columbia River Gorge is hosting a Trauma & Resiliency Summit on October 20th & 21st, 2016 in The Dalles, OR. Registration is made free to attendees through MARC Grant funding. If you are in the area please join us! And please note that registration is only available prior to the event as we have a limited amount of space. Claire

Effectively communicating a message in 15 seconds can take hours to formulate. After spending weeks, months and years upgrading our most current phrase “resilience trumps ACEs”, our own resilience was getting exhausted. A simpler more meaningful message was necessary to capture attention and create new awareness. If we hadn’t practiced resilience training ourselves we might have never accomplished our task. Teri Barila kept bouncing ideas my way. I kept researching to understand why...

August 25, 2016 By: Larke N. Huang , Ph.D., Director, SAMHSA Office of Behavioral Health Equity; Rebecca Flatow, Office of Policy, Planning, and Innovation; Mary Blake, SAMHSA Center for Mental Health Services Six cities were invited to SAMHSA for a listening session to present their innovative approaches to addressing trauma. This blog is part of a series that highlights community approaches in selected implementation domains and how each city is working to create safer and healthier places...

[Ed. note: This is the second of a three-part series that David Bornstein is doing on how communities are integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on ACEs science.] Liberals and conservatives often disagree about the causes of poverty and other social ills. Broadly speaking, liberals point the finger at structural factors and advocate for policy changes, while conservatives look to individuals and families and favor behavior changes. Clearly, both points of view...

This is an accessible, practical article. After a brief definition and explanation of resilience, it gives 20 easy, realistic strategies for building resilience in children. Share this with everyone you know! http://www.heysigmund.com/building-resilience-children/

Everyone wants to flourish in their own uniqueness because the ability to express our individuality is the point of origin to live a self-sufficient and fulfilling life. Our individual ability to feel safe to unplug from cultural norms is the beginning of our ability to thrive in a healthy environment. And no environment can be healthy for everyone until everyone feels safe to express their truth. And if one person lives in an unhealthy environment, everyone lives in an unhealthy...

[ Ed. note: Following is a media release published yesterday by Mathematica Policy Research. This follows on the heals of the report, "Self-Healing Communities" that Laura Porter, Dr. Robert Anda and WHO wrote for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Both reports and executive summaries are attached to this blog post. Both reports are significant, because they show that community ACEs initiatives -- with "modest investments and limited staff" -- are solving some of our most intractable...

[First of three articles] Ten years ago, Patsy Hite, 70, rarely left her home at night. “I heard a lot of sirens so I always kept to myself,” she said. Hite lives in the Highlands, a 40-block section in Longview, a city in Cowlitz County in southwestern Washington. The Highlands is home to about 5,000 residents. The neighborhood is adjacent to an industrial district, and was hit hard by the loss of jobs in the timber and manufacturing industries. Long-term unemployment has brought blight,...

Roger B. Bairstow exemplifies one man who is making a difference because he supports a leadership model with a primal desire to serve the well being of people. Roger directs Human Relations and Corporate Responsibility at Broetje Orchards, one of the largest privately owned apple orchards in the United States. Broetje Orchards has a reputation for implementing trauma-informed practices even before the term was coined and they uphold their integrity by following Robert Greenleaf’s test: Do...

I was asked to prepare a one-pager to use following screenings of Paper Tigers , or in conjunction with using the ACE Questionnaire. While hard to capture all I wanted in one page, here is the product, in case it might be of use to others. ~~One reminder, from Dr. Rob Anda- it is very important that the ACE Questionnaire never be used as a diagnostic test. He reiterated this at the April 2016 Science of Hope Seattle WA. conference hosted by Healthy Generations. Now that you’ve watched Paper...

Kindergarten teacher Erica Nunemaker ripped down the clip chart she used for behavior management in her classroom. Children moved their clip up for good behavior and down for bad behavior. Nunemaker realized the same students were moving down every day. The clip was a public display of the student’s failure, and children weren’t learning how to fix their behavior. “I’ve noticed that a lot of times we discipline them and tell them that’s not right ... but then we don’t give them a solution to...