September 2020

ACEs Connection was today awarded a $500,000 grant from Blue Shield of California Foundation for its work to support communities and families in these challenging times.

Live, Interactive Online Workshop. Get the experience and tools to overcome the equity challenges in your data. Few people intentionally use data to make racist, or sexist, or unethical decisions. However, it’s very easy to do so accidentally. This has serious consequences for communities, policies, individuals, and organizations. From regular citizens, to decision makers, to CEOs, to tech workers, we all need a toolkit for embedding equity and ethics on our data products. What you'll get:...

When you can’t do what you want, do what you can! This was the title of a song that was sent to me from a fan of our courses. The song was inspired by the country’s amazing feats of creativity during pandemic quarantining. It’s the perfect fight song for CRI’s upcoming virtual course. Course 2: Trauma-Supportive Certification offers more than 30 strategies to foster resilience in your family, workplace, or community. Several of the strategies were specifically designed to address the impact...

The School Crisis Recovery and Renewal project Supporting students, educators, school staff, and school-based clinicians to effectively implement trauma-informed crisis recovery and renewal strategies. The School Crisis Recovery & Renewal (SCRR) project is a new initiative that launched June 2020. Funded by SAMHSA, the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal (SCRR) is a National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) Treatment and Services Adaptation Center (Category II, 2020-2025).

Svensson is no stranger to trauma. She attributes her ACE score of 2 to when her parents, living in Bakersfield, adopted an older, trouble-ridden sixth-grade boy for five years, starting when she was in first grade.

Student suspension rates dropped. Teacher retention rose. Membership in the PTA swelled from zero to more than 200. More kids said in a survey that there was at least one adult at school whom they could talk to if they had a problem. The data—a comparison of the Bounce Coalition’s pilot school and one with similar demographics—told the Kentucky resilience-boosting group that they were on the right track. The Bounce Coalition formed in 2014; the catalyst was a grant from the Foundation for a...

This story is part of an occasional series about California-based pediatricians who are incorporating ACEs screening into their practices. In the first installment published in May, which you can find here , Dr. Amy Shekarchi and other team members had just launched their ACEs screening by phone. A community health worker from a clinic affiliated with Los Angeles County’s Department of Health Care Services recently called a teenage patient to find out if she ever felt unsafe in her home or...

Social science evidence from the National Survey of Children's Health helps place California's ACE screening mandate in context. The data suggest California does not do well in providing developmental screening in pediatric care -- a much more direct method than ACE screening to detect problems arising from toxic stress and adversity. See https://www.acesconnection.com/blog/painful-questions-what-happens-when-doctors-uncover-adverse-childhood-experiences

The White House has opened an investigation into Princeton University, accusing it of civil rights violations after its president admitted racism exists at the school. Earlier this month, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber published a letter to the university community in which he acknowledged that the university has and continues to be shaped by systemic racism. "Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by...

By Agnes Constante, Center for Health Journalism, September 17, 2020 Paul Hoang moved to Orange County in 2007 after a taxing work year as a mental health clinician in Illinois. In the Midwest, he had seen clients who drove up to six hours once a month — even through blizzards — for his services. Demand was high because there was a lack of providers serving the Vietnamese community, he said. It was something he tried to remedy by getting involved in local politics to advocate for more...

By Lina Guzman, Yiyu Chen, and Dana Thompson, National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, September 15, 2020 Health insurance is critical to children’s well-being. Children who have health insurance are more likely than those without coverage to use preventative health services, experience fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations, have better overall health, and have better educational and labor force outcomes. Over the last decade, increased federal and state...

By Rachel Rosenberg, Maia O'Meara, and Mya' Sanders, Child Trends, September 15, 2020 Nearly 18,000 young people aged out of the foster care system in fiscal year (FY) 2018. In other words, the child welfare system failed to reunify these young people with their parents or find them another legal, permanent placement through adoption or guardianship. Relative to their peers in the general population, young people who age out of foster care often experience lower levels of educational...