May 2017

A bill working its way through the state legislature would create a state-funded program to help new mothers in the first few months and years after the birth of their children. The CalWORKs Baby Wellness and Family Support Home Visiting Program would spend $100 million to offer home visits from nurses or social workers to new mothers who are living in poverty. Support for home visiting programs is grounded in research that has found regular postpartum home visits can improve the health of...

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans,...

TRAUMA INFORMED PRACTICES COACH JOB SUMMARY: The Trauma Informed Practices Coach position is a two-year grant funded position, with the potential for extension, with Los Angeles Education Partnership. This project is designed to support and implement a trauma-informed school environment in selected K-12 schools both within and outside of California through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente. A central component of this project’s approach to a trauma-informed school environment is to embed...

In a study released today in the Journal of Adolescent Health , researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found that young men of color treated for violent injury in CHOP's Emergency Department overwhelmingly identified a need for mental health care. At intake and during the course of their case management through CHOP VIP, youth identified their needs and goals for recovery beyond the treatment of their physical injuries. Click on the links below to see how these data help...

The average person is keeping 13 secrets right now. Five of them are secrets they’ve never told another living soul. These stats come from a new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which looked at more than 13,000 secrets over 10 different studies. The researchers asked participants if they were keeping any of 38 different common categories of secrets which ranged from infidelity to financial secrets to secret hobbies. The most common secrets that people...

Parents, teachers and students streamed into the library of Palo Alto’s Gunn High School on a warm evening this spring to hear about a new plan , coming this fall, to help high school students develop empathy and coping skills through “social and emotional learning.” For starters, the audience wanted the answer to a question that has dogged the jargon phrase for years: What is social and emotional learning and why should schools get involved in it? The term is bedeviled by abstractions, but...

Breakout sessions for the free Crow Wing Energized fourth annual Health and Wellness Summit cover a variety of topics, including how to be more active, how to eat right on a budget and how gratitude can be life-changing and more. The health and wellness summit to celebrate lifestyle change begins with networking and continental breakfast at 7 a.m. before the session starts at 8 a.m. and continues with keynote speaker Traci Mann followed by breakout sessions. Lunch is included at noon...

If you could get a glimpse into your child's future would you? One test could determine whether your child could become involved in crime, get addicted to opioids or die an early death. In 1995 a study launched in Southern California by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente set out to find the reason more adults are becoming obese. Over two years they asked 17,000 adults to answer 10 questions about their childhood... What was uncovered is far beyond obesity and is considered to be the largest study...

A new report from Young Minds Advocacy makes the case that the publicly funded mental health system for children in California needs a shake up. Released last week to coincide with Mental Health Awareness Month, the report argues that California needs to adopt a comprehensive vision of children’s mental health. Responsibility for the mental health needs of California’s most vulnerable children is spread out among a Byzantine system of federal and state funding streams and child-serving...

Monique Marrow first started working on creating a trauma-responsive system in a juvenile justice setting when she worked as deputy director of treatment and rehabilitation services for the Ohio Department of Youth Services in 2005. Back then, her approach to talking about trauma in the justice system was met with some pushback. “Here comes Dr. Marrow, with her hug-a-thug speech,” she remembers some skeptical staff members saying. [For more of this story, written by Jeremy Loudenback, go to ...

George Washington (not the famous one) first ended up in a New York homeless shelter in the mid-1980s, after he came home from prison for robbery and crack cocaine hit the streets. Since then, he’s passed between girlfriends’ houses, hotels, shelters all over the city, rooming houses, family members’ couches, rehab facilities, and a cell on Rikers Island. [For more of this story, written by Christie Thompson, go to ...

Susun Kim, Esq. talks about community partnerships and the power of collaboration.