Blog

By Jennifer Friend and Sean Boulton, EdSource, October 14, 2021 C arla is a high school senior from Newport Harbor High School who plans to attend college. If you knew Carla two years ago, this would be surprising. During her sophomore year, Carla was struggling in school. Her teacher, who believed her failing grades were related to housing insecurity, referred her to a nonprofit organization working on campus in partnership with the school to serve students experiencing homelessness. The...

By Louisa Loveluck and Mustafa Salim, The Washington Post, October 21, 2021 N o one lives here anymore. The mud-brick buildings are empty, just husks of the human life that became impossible on this land. Wind whips through bone-dry reeds. For miles, there’s no water to be seen. Carved from an ancient land once known as Mesopotamia, Iraq is home to the cradle of civilization — the expanse between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where the first complex human communities emerged. But as...

By Tomas Monarrez and Carina Chien, Housing Matters, October 20, 2021 In the US, family preferences and local policy choices preserve school segregation by race. This report examines the role of local school attendance boundary policies in perpetuating racial segregation in schools. The authors created a spatial dataset representing all metropolitan areas in the US by combining more than 65,000 school attendance boundaries from the 2019–20 school year and school performance, census data, and...

“What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing” by renowned brain and trauma expert Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD and Oprah Winfrey - a 2021 must read! We are so excited to announce that Georgia’s Essentials for Childhood Initiative, in partnership with Gwinnett County Public Libraries, will be launching a Georgia Reads Book Club of “What Happened to You?”. Attend the kickoff event on November 15th at 7 pm EST to learn more about the book and how Georgia is working towards...

By Dan Parks, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, October 20, 2021 Angela Williams has taken the helm of the nation’s largest charity with a powerhouse resume behind her — and a long list of challenges in front of her. As the first woman and the first African American to lead United Way Worldwide, she must deal with the fallout of accusations by three former employees of a toxic workplace culture that led to an internal investigation and a recommendation that the organization improve its...

By Anna Varela, Georgia State University News Hub, October 19, 2021 Georgia State University’s Gerontology Institute has received a $1.58 million grant to support training nursing home staff across the state to improve care for residents with dementia. The training will emphasize new trauma-informed approaches and reducing the use of antipsychotic drugs to manage residents’ symptoms. The three-year project, jointly funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the...

By Deepa Shivram, National Public Radio, October 20, 2021 A coalition of the nation's leading experts in pediatric health has issued an urgent warning declaring the mental health crisis among children so dire that it has become a national emergency. The declaration was penned by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children's Hospital Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which together represent more than 77,000 physicians and 200 children's hospitals.

By Jessica Grose, The New York Times, October 20, 2021 I have heard from many readers and friends that their kids are struggling to adjust to in-person schooling this year. For the little ones, there’s more separation anxiety, which means more tears at drop-off, and struggles to even get out the door. For older children and teens, I’m hearing that some previously motivated kids are less engaged. Perhaps they fell behind during remote learning and feel discouraged now that they’re back in the...

Register for the Summit Today This space will continue to be updated. Stay tuned for the day’s agenda and speaker bios as we get closer to the date! Building on the 2019 New Orleans Summit on Compassion & Resilience and Called to Care strategic plan and report , the Called to Care 2021 New Orleans Virtual Summit will bring together mental health and well-being practitioners, community members, sector and systems leaders, and educators for a day of shared learning, coordination,...

Something I’ve seen in my work with patients is a connection between ACEs and an unhealthy relationship with food. In these cases, food is used to cope with toxic stress and unresolved ACEs, and a frequent side effect of that relationship is weight gain. Losing this weight requires healing the root cause (the trauma), not just fighting the symptom (the weight) with diet and exercise. Read on to learn more.

By Guest Author, 10/21/21, positiveexperience.org/blog We met Melody Centeno when she spoke at the National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect this spring. She embodies so much of what HOPE stands for: the healing told of sustained nurturing relationships, and how safe stable and equitable environments promote child development. From her experience, we see how history is not destiny. She is now a licensed social worker in New York, and has used her own experiences to improve the lives of...