January 2022

By Annia Ciezadlo, Photo: Seth Wenig/AP, The Guardian, January 14, 2022 I n New York , some things never change. If you die in a fire, it’s always your fault. When a fire started in a heater and ripped down the hallway of an apartment building in December 1998, killing four people in a blast of heat and smoke, city officials framed the fire as a tragedy that could have been avoided if people had only remembered to close their doors. “People should close the door behind them when leaving a...

Laura Porter’s research supports increasing three capacities that allow people to thrive. They are: building capabilities, increasing attachment and belonging, and supporting the culture and spirituality in communities. When working with organizations and communities, she warns that if the focus is solely on building capabilities, we make the process into an “individual fix.” Building individual capacities is very important to help people thrive, however we cannot deny the biologically...

By Laura Gallant, 1/19/22, https://positiveexperience.org/category/blog/ Registration is now open for the 2022 HOPE Summit – Growing HOPE! Join us on March 8th for our one-day Virtual Summit. This is an opportunity to learn about the power of Positive Childhood Experiences, the HOPE Framework and how to incorporate HOPE into your work and organization. The HOPE framework offers a new approach that brings identifying, celebrating, and promoting positive experiences to the forefront of care. [...

<<<Editors note: Judge says she 'made a mistake' berating an elderly cancer patient over weeds. >>> This is the first of an irregular series called "What Would You Do? " Many of you probably saw the story, including the courtroom video, about the Michigan judge who yelled at a 72-year-old cancer patient for not maintaining his yard. "You should be ashamed of yourself!" 31st District Judge Alexis G. Krot (yelled...or spoke loudly and sternly, depending on your definition) at...

Peace Over Violence is offering a free webinar series on Dating After Trauma. I'm sure this is something that our ACEs members and communities would appreciate. Anyone from anywhere in the country can attend. The time is PST. RSVP at peaceoverviolence.org/dating-2022 You need a free Zoom account to register. ASL interpretation and Spanish translation are available. Flyers in English and Spanish are attached. Please contact me should you have any questions. Take care. Federico Carmona...

The Attachment & Trauma Network is honored to announce the participation of the U.S. Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona in our 5th annual Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools Conference. Sec. Cardona will address attendees during our general session on Tuesday, Feb 22 in Houston, TX. Sec. Cardona and leaders in the trauma-informed education community will have a live (via satellite) conversation about the importance of trauma-informed strategies and practices in schools and the ways in...

WANDA BOONE: A RESILIENCE RAINMAKER Wanda Boone, executive director of a North Carolina nonprofit, Together for Resilient Youth (TRY), to combat youth and adult substance use, not only raised three children of her own but also fostered seven children with mental health and substance use challenges. Despite – or perhaps because – of her own high ACEs score, Boone said that early on she decided “my main goal in life was to be a fantastic wife and mother.” She’s exceeded her goal in many ways.

By Katharine Smyth, Photo: Millennium Images, The Atlantic, January 12, 2022 T hirty-seven minutes after sitting down to lunch, Francesca and I hugged goodbye in a strip-mall parking lot. We were both fairly certain, I think, that we would not be seeing each other again. The high-school classmate of a friend’s friend’s husband, she’d been such a promising friendship prospect: She was a professional violinist and fellow New Yorker who was writing her dissertation on pollen. But I was awkward,...

By Vanessa Veselka, Photo: Clayton Cotterell, The New York Times, January 14, 2022 L ast winter, workers at a memory care facility in western Oregon decided they were done watching the residents suffer. Conditions at the Rawlin at Riverbend, a 72-bed home in Springfield, were horrific because of critically low staffing and a lack of training. Elderly residents screamed from their rooms for assistance, and workers had to make the kinds of decisions that people are forced to make in war: Do...

By Michael Franczak and Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò, Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/PA, The Guardian, January 14, 2022 ctivists pushing for global reparations for colonialism and slavery are often accused of asking for the politically impossible. At the international scale, however, reparations are more plausible than one might think. That is because an international mechanism to move resources to the formerly colonized world in a politically feasible fashion already exists: the policy instrument of “Special...

By Elissa Strauss, Photo: Getty Images, January 14, 2022 The fight for universal paid parental leave has been dominated by women. It's mostly women who birth and feed babies, and therefore it is mostly women who are too often left to choose between healing from birth and adequately caring for their newborn, or a paycheck. It's a choice few would want to make, and yet the vast majority of new moms are put in that position and suffer. As a result, women are more likely to get angry, and then...

Martin Luther King Jr was a walking, talking example of everything this country despises about the quest for Black liberation.