March 2017

t’s easy to see why collective impact —the commitment of a group of important cross-sector actors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem—caught fire in 2010. During an economic downturn, when few new resources were available, a voice said there was a way to do more with what we already had. The concept offered hope for achieving results at the scale we desired, even though we were feeling constrained. And thank goodness. Collective impact both validated work that had been...

Tobacco use is now concentrated among the least advantaged socioeconomic groups in society, according to a new study at the Colorado School of Public Health at University of Colorado (CU) Anschutz. The findings show that most remaining smokers in the United States have low income, no college education, a disability or no health insurance. [For more of this story, written by Traci Pedersen, go to ...

“Beyond losing your child, hearing that they have been acting out sexually against other children is the worst news you can get,” says Janet Routzen, executive director of the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society (WBCWS) on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. In addition to providing services and shelter to victims of domestic violence , sexual assault and stalking, the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society provides sexual assault advocacy services, conducts education and outreach among...

Big Data has transformed everything from sports to politics to education. It could transform mental-health treatment, too—if only psychologists would stop ignoring it. Grace was a heroin addict who had been clean for about six months; I was a 34-year-old therapist in training. When we started psychotherapy, in 2006, Grace had a lot going against her. She was an unemployed single mother who had been in a string of relationships with violent men and was addicted to drugs. Yet despite these...

When Ameen Al-Dalli was a sophomore in high school in 2014, each weekday before sunrise he would walk the quiet, tree-lined streets of Fairfax, Virginia, to the school bus stop. Because Ameen’s public school, about five miles away, started at 7:20 a.m., the bus came early. “I feel drowsy and just like, ugh, I want to go home,” he told National Geographic filmmakers during his walk in the gloom. This wasn’t always the case for high schoolers. A few generations ago, the bell rang around 9 a.m.

Substance abuse exacts a heavy toll on the American workplace, a new analysis shows. Employees who struggle with drinking and drug addiction miss many more days of work, have higher health care costs and are less productive than those without these disorders, researchers report. An analysis revealed that employees with substance use disorders miss nearly 50 percent more work days than their colleagues, and up to six weeks of work a year, according to the National Safety Council, NORC at the...

Life prospects appeared bleak for 17-year-old Terrance Williams on a quiet Saturday in the spring of 2013. He was facing years in prison on charges of armed burglary. This was just the latest setback in a rough and tumble Philadelphia childhood that had taught him that the only way to make a living was by hustle and crime. Then Terrance noticed a bit of ruckus coming down the hallway of the Philadelphia jailhouse where he awaited his day in court. Someone was shouting that people should get...

It was October 2012. I had been invited to give a lecture on secondhand drinking (the negative impacts of a person's drinking behaviors on others) to Stanford Medical School students enrolled in Dr. Stanley Fischman's Eating Disorders and Addiction Rotation. Dr. Fischman asked me to speak with his rotation students on a regular basis given my decades experience with loved ones' alcohol misuse, my own eating disorders, and my relevant work experience. He wanted his students to understand the...

When Echo first announced the theme for this year’s conference – Social & Historical Trauma – some were worried about whether we could pull off an event built around such a difficult and sensitive topic. Yet we felt we had to tackle this subject since every year at our childhood trauma conference participants always raise the questions, “What about racism? What about community trauma and poverty? How do these things contribute to Adverse Childhood Experiences?” Kanwarpal Dhaliwal from...

College is unaffordable for a lot of families. That’s widely acknowledged across party lines. But a new report shows that as many as 95 percent of colleges are completely unaffordable—and thus unavailable—for huge swaths of Americans. For many would-be college students, their choices are delimited by their socioeconomic status before they have even taken the SAT. In a new report, the nonprofit Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) tackles those issues—and the numbers aren’t good:...

After-school programs are on the chopping block in the Trump administration’s proposed budget, an issue a reporter drew attention to at a recent press conference with the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney. In response to a question about the future of these programs , Mulvaney said, “They’re supposed to be educational programs, right? And that’s what they’re supposed to do … There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re helping results, helping kids do better in...

Donald Trump in America, Rob Ford in Canada, Brexit in the U.K., and (maybe) Marine Le Pen in France— as I wrote on Tuesday , populism is tied to a cultural backlash reinforced by our increasingly uneven geography. These growing divides generate the anger and backlash that translates into backward-looking, reactionary populist politics. The economic strategies of populists are territorial: walls, immigration restrictions, and rules based on national origin. But populism’s rise in Europe as...