June 2018

“ Animals .” “ Menace .” “ Blood-stained killing fields .” These are all terms President Donald Trump used in a one-week period to describe undocumented immigrants, alleged members of MS-13 and the purported harm they are causing our country. The White House doubled down on these assertions by releasing an official statement titled, “What You Need to Know About the Violent Animals of MS-13.” Others in the administration have echoed these statements, including Thomas Homan, the acting U.S.

Beth Jameson, Ph.D., RN, NJ-CSN is a Nurse Scientist with a newly minted Ph.D. from Rutgers University. I was fortunate to meet Beth when she was in the midst of her dissertation research, which included interviewing school nurses about job satisfaction. I will never forget our intense and honest discussion when I shared my frustration with feeling like a “caged bird” at school. In fact, it was so eye-opening that I wrote a blog post called “The Tale of the Caged Bird.” Beth and I bonded...

We know that good relationships are so important to our happiness, yet we may not know just how vital they are to our health and well-being. What do our connections to others give us? And what happens when we don’t have them? The Vital Benefits of Good Relationships Research shows that good relationships help people live longer, deal with stress better, have healthier habits, and have stronger resistance to colds. In a 2010 review of 148 studies, researchers found that social relationships...

The idea of adding an adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) screening tool to your practice’s workflow can be daunting – which tool, will you have time, does it add enough value? The Child Health and Development Interactive System (CHADIS) is helping to address this challenge by partnering with the National Pediatric Practice Community on ACEs (NPPC) to add an ACEs questionnaire into its system. Join this webinar to learn more about how this collaboration can help support your efforts to...

This story has a mostly happy ending. However, it did not begin that way. It is a personal story, which begins with the police knocking on my door in Cary, North Carolina late one night in February 2017. I was sleeping and it was around 2 am, but the police forced me to go to a Crisis and Assessment Center in Raleigh, NC. I questioned why this was happening but the police said they did not know, and that “they were just doing their job.” While I was at UNC WakeBrook, I asked to see the...

A very short video about how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) affect adult illness such as heart disease, autoimmune disease and cancer, and why I wrote Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, And How You Can Heal .

In Cincinnati, a unique housing option is allowing low-income renters to participate in the management and upkeep of their homes as a way to earn dividends they can cash in later. Margery Spinney and Carol Smith founded Renting Partnerships in 2013 to help organize affordable housing communities for those with few choices. “There’s never going to be enough government funding to provide affordable housing for everybody,” Spinney says. “We are not replacing homeownership and we’re not going to...

Author Alissa Quart writes that the costs of housing, child care, health care and college are outpacing salaries and threatening the livelihoods of middle class Americans. [For more on this story by TERRY GROSS, go to https://www.npr.org/2018/06/26/623367320/squeezed-explores-why-america-is-getting-too-expensive-for-the-middle-class ]

California plans to spend $13.3 million over six years to identify and replicate successful ingredients of community engagement, an essential but, for many school districts, elusive part of local control — the shorthand for setting budgeting and academic priorities under the state’s school financing law. The new money — included in the 2018-19 budget — will fund a network that eventually will reach as many as 80 districts. The funding represents the first substantial state effort to...

In October of 2017, Dr. Andi Clements and I applied to receive Technical Assistance from SAMHA’s National Center for Trauma Informed Care (NCTIC) requesting to host a webinar during in 2018 of all the cities who are creating a community-wide Trauma-Informed System of Care. Much to our surprise, the response we received from Dr. Joan Gillece, Executive Director of NCTIC was that Johnson City had emerged as a leader in this work. She explained, “In 2014, the Substance Abuse Mental Health...

It was a very gratifying week, being told that our Santa Fe community forum “The Preventable Death of Anna, Age Eight,” focused on the need to design Child Welfare 2.0, was filled to capacity. It says something very good about a city when an event on childhood trauma gets booked up. To meet the interest, another workshop has been added. More will be sponsored across New Mexico to enlist people in our social moonshot and create Child Welfare 2.0. Our challenges in New Mexico are not unlike...

By @Anndee Hochman During a December 2017 convening in Philadelphia, several leaders from Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) realized they had more in common than a passion for building resilience in their communities. They all hailed from places that had recently been scorched or flooded by natural disasters: wildfires in California and the Columbia River Gorge, hurricanes in Florida, the lingering residue of 2012’s post-tropical cyclone Sandy in the Northeast.