Blog

Authors note: This piece is co-authored by @Lara Kain and @Christine Cissy White. Though we had never worked together or met, we were asked to co-present on creating t rauma-informed changes in communities by the Attachment Trauma Network for the first national (now annual) Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools Summit in Washington, DC. This article is an expanded essay version of that presentation). Be the Spark Oprah Winfrey helped mainstream discussion about...

My dream is to create a space which feels safe, yet empowering; offering a hand to hold along the road of recovery.

Rather than holding on and remaining focused and alert, we need to get on with living. Keeping our body and minds active helps us move forward. Staying immobile isn’t going to guide us into our healing place. Meditation, while a useful beginning step for some people is not always the answer.

On April 4, the White House posted a fact sheet on its website warning that legal “loopholes” were allowing tens of thousands of immigrant children who entered the country on their own to remain in the United States. The next day, another post went up: “Loopholes in Child Trafficking Laws Put Victims—and American Citizens—At Risk.” And the same week, the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services not normally known for its politics,...

It’s no secret that America has an incarceration problem. And being “tough on crime” is something politicians proclaim in election years to prove that they care about safety. But a recent poll commissioned by the Vera Institute of Justice shows that the tide is turning when it comes to what people want for their communities. A majority of Americans—67 percent overall, including 61 percent in rural areas—agreed that building more jails and prisons does not reduce crime. While politicians make...

On Rebecca Palacios’s first day in front of a classroom, one of her white students picked up his chair and threw it toward her, declaring that he refused to be taught by a “Mexican teacher.” It was 1976, Palacios was 22 years old, and many of her first-grade students were at the school because of a recently launched busing program in Corpus Christi, Texas, that the courts had mandated in an effort to racially integrate campuses. Large numbers of white students were now traveling across town...

Easing the deep and long-held mistrust between law enforcement and communities of color has no easy fix. But in Newark, N.J., police have embarked on an experiment that they hope will calm tensions by immersing both cops and residents in uncomfortable truths about slavery and Jim Crow, coupled with lessons on epigenetics and trauma. The Newark Police Department has mandated that each of its approximately 1,110 officers participate in three days of training alongside city residents, swapping...

In the midst of riots in 1968 after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was slain, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act . The federal legislation addressed one of the bitterest aspects of racism in the U.S.: segregated housing. It prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, and national origin when selling and renting housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has administered the act with some success. From 1970 to 2010,...

You know that getting exercise, eating vegetables and quitting smoking are good for you. A new study shows just how good they are, in terms of the number of years they can add to your life. American women who followed five "healthy lifestyle factors" lived about 14 years longer than women who followed none of them, according to a report published Monday in the journal Circulation. For men, the difference was about 12 years. The five healthy lifestyle factors identified in the study should...

Loneliness isn't just a fleeting feeling, leaving us sad for a few hours to a few days. Research in recent years suggests that for many people, loneliness is more like a chronic ache, affecting their daily lives and sense of well-being. Now a nationwide survey by the health insurer Cigna underscores that. It finds that loneliness is widespread in America, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out always or sometimes. Using one of the best-known tools...

We hear you! With the phenomenal growth of ACEs Connection (we’re now at more than 22,200 terrific members), the volume of content has burgeoned, and email notifications from the site about the latest blog posts and comments can be (OK, OK...are!) overwhelming. Especially to those people (about 17,000 of you) who became members before October 2017, when we changed our system so that new members don’t automatically receive emails about blog posts and comments from ACEs Connection. So, here’s...

The Center for Youth Wellness and ACEs Connection are hosting the third biennial ACEs Conference Oct. 15-17, 2018, at the Hyatt Embarcadero in San Francisco, CA. The first day is devoted to a pediatric symposium. The main conference will take place Oct. 16-17. Our theme, “Action to Access”, will draw a line from the call to action established by previous conferences to the problem of access — how different individuals and communities are able to obtain and use the information, resources, and...