The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its partners released a website that provides first-of-its-kind, neighborhood-level health data for the 500 largest US cities [PDF-269KB]. The 500 Cities project provides data on 5 risk behaviors, 13 health outcomes, and 9 prevention practices for the most common, costly, and preventable chronic diseases. Health professionals can view data by city or census tract, explore the interactive map , get map books for individual cities, and...

Lincoln Alternative High School is in the small city of Walla Walla in southeastern Washington. It had been a place for students with disciplinary issues, those removed from the area’s other high schools, ordered there by a judge, or those who had performed poorly in middle school. Tucked in the middle of a residential neighborhood, Lincoln’s brick edifice and cherry-red doors now serve as a place of opportunity for many students. At Lincoln, the first trauma-informed high school in the...

Over the last four calendar school years the number of students being suspended by Battle Ground High School has dropped more than 50 percent. During the 2012-13 school year 387 students were suspended, compared to only 145 during the 2015-16 school year. BGHS Principal Mike Hamilton points at a number of different elements that has led to a more positive culture in the high school. He said it is a product of all the district cogs operating in unison and making student engagement and...

Society absorbs a lot of costs that are associated with childhood inflicted trauma (ACEs). Yet we fund programs regularly, and don’t really require solid data on results. That just seems to be a byproduct of people managing programs. We commit to results, secure funding based on that commitment, then do everything we can to prove that we have results. We secure data that suggests progress, and hide any data that then problem might be getting worse (at least in my experience). Fortunately, we...

[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...

[ 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,...

Graphic artist Anne Nelson created this visual roadmap during the partner showcase, capturing the "heart of the matter" for each community member Teri Barila, co-founder and CEO of the Children’s Resilience Initiative and the igniting force that brought change to a quiet corner of southeast Washington, kicked off last month’s Beyond Paper Tigers Conference by sharing one of her “aha” moments. In 2007, she attended a conference in Winthrop, WA, where Dr. Robert Anda spoke about the CDC-Kaiser...

Healthy Auburn for Life. That's the vision of the new Blue Ribbon Committee of Auburn tasked to make Auburn the healthiest city in Washington by 2020. The committee's mission is to optimize the health and well being of all residents through education, participation and innovation. Of the nine major health issues identified by the committee, three have been chosen as a primary first focus to analyze and develop plans for improvement: obesity in adults and children; maternal and child health;...

  By DAVID FOOTE and JO REASONS At United Way of Kitsap County, we believe in challenging the status quo to the way we approach fighting poverty in our community. We believe in thinking differently and we are excited to be taking bold,...