On May 3, Partnership with Children hosted a panel discussion, “Poverty, The Brain and Mental Health: How Stress Affects Learning, and the Science Behind It,” in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH, Commissioner, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, was joined by Partnership with Children Executive Director Margaret Crotty and other experts in the fields of neuroscience and public health to discuss the critically important relationship between the chronic stress of growing up in poverty and brain development.
Partnership with Children provides trauma-informed counseling, school-wide services and family and community outreach in New York City public schools where students are at the highest risk of academic failure and dropping out. The organization works with public schools in the city’s highest-need areas in all 5 boroughs.
According to Maria Astudillo, Vice President of Behavioral Health, the agency is beginning to collect ACEs data in the high poverty schools where children are shouldering the impact of multiple sources of trauma. Partnership with Children is also in the process of training clinical staff—over 80 school-based social workers—in trauma-informed practices. Click here for a videotape of the panel discussion. A copy of the May 3 program is attached.
The human brain begins as a neural tube that develops five weeks after conception. Years later, it is fully formed. On Tuesday, experts in neuroscience, genetics and social work met in Manhattan to talk about what can happen to it along the way, and what emerging research tells us about how children who seem broken can be made whole.
Officially, the meeting was called Poverty, the Brain and Mental Health. It could have been called This Is Your Brain on Poverty. Or: Don’t Give Up on Little Kids.
To read the entire article by Jim Dwyer, click here.
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