Robert Augustin, (left to right) Katharine Bensinger and Maria Andrino of Metropolitan Family Services' Parenting Fundamentals program Katharine Bensinger founded a program called Parenting Fundamentals at an agency called Community Counseling Centers of Chicago nearly two decades ago. The program had been providing parenting education classes to low-income people for almost a decade when Bensinger attended a speech by Dr. Robert Anda , co-principle investigator of the CDC-Kaiser Permanente...

Tammy Ambre (l) and Keri Bechelli of One Hope United __________________________________________ One Hope United attempts to lead those affected by childhood trauma down a Healing Path. That’s the name of a three-year-old program that has brought a different approach to helping people with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The program operates out of One Hope United’s office in Gurnee, IL, north of Chicago, and three others in the metropolitan area. “It’s...

Between the ages of 4 and 15, Jonathan Booker was in and out of 13 homeless shelters. His mother was often too busy to care for him, his grandmother tried but found she was too old and didn’t have enough money, and he never knew his father,...

Organizations across the Midwest that are integrating trauma-informed practices based on adverse childhood experiences research are like freckles amassing into a suntan, says Elena Quintana. “It’s spreading,” says the executive...

In a sense all courts solve problems, although traditionally, the approach is punitive – translating a crime into how many months or years a defendant owes society and warehousing him or her in a prison. While not excusing drug abuse, domestic...

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglass Jane Halladay, director of the service systems program at the National Child Traumatic Stress Network , which developed the Think Trauma ...

Laura Porter, co-founder ACE Interface (Mike Kelly photo) _____________________________ CHICAGO—Across the United States these days, it seems as if hardly a week goes by without a conference or a workshop about adverse childhood experiences...

There are three ways to look at how the juvenile justice system is using modern practices to reduce youth crime and violence. One is what happens on the way to the detention center where a kid is held until trial – i.e., how the system decides...

The dirty little secret about family courts – where kids and parents who’ve entered the child welfare system end up – is that they often make things worse, especially for the youngest children -- from newborns to five-year-olds....

Three years ago, Judge Lynn Tepper of Florida’s Sixth Judicial Circuit Court in Dade City, FL, learned about the CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study The ground-breaking research links childhood abuse and neglect with adult...

Juvenile offenders in Florida have starkly higher rates of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) than the population as a whole, according to a study conducted by the state’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the...

Youth Today plans to publish an article about ACEs and mental health, and we're looking for examples of trauma-informed agencies who want to tell their stories and talk about why being trauma-informed is so important, how agencies can train their...