Blog

Shame imprinted in the early years of life typically plays out in the background, yet it affects adult quality of life in significant ways.

Joanne Whitney, 84, a retired associate clinical professor of pharmacy at the University of California-San Francisco, often feels devalued when interacting with health care providers. There was the time several years ago when she told an emergency room doctor that the antibiotic he wanted to prescribe wouldn't counteract the kind of urinary tract infection she had. He wouldn't listen, even when she mentioned her professional credentials. She asked to see someone else, to no avail. "I was...

By National Governors Association, October 18, 2021 Executive Summary Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have a significant impact on health and well-being, that can continue into adulthood. Interest in preventing and addressing the consequences of ACEs, including toxic stress, has grown across sectors and is shaping policy discussions among state and local leaders who are eager to support effective prevention, detection and intervention strategies. COVID-19 has brought additional...

By Oliver Milman, Andrew Witherspoon, Rita Lu, and Alvin Chang, The Guardian, October 14, 2021 T he enormous, unprecedented pain and turmoil caused by the climate crisis is often discussed alongside what can seem like surprisingly small temperature increases – 1.5C or 2C hotter than it was in the era just before the car replaced the horse and cart. These temperature thresholds will again be the focus of upcoming UN climate talks at the COP26 summit in Scotland as countries variously dawdle...

By Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic, October 16, 2021 Throughout the pandemic, media outlets and online dashboards have provided constant updates on the number of people who have died from COVID-19. Far less prominent—but just as striking—are the tallies of those left behind. According to an estimate published recently in the journal Pediatrics , at least 140,000 American children had lost a parent or caregiver because of the coronavirus by the end of June—meaning that one of roughly every 500...

For Peter Buckley, program manager for the PACEs initiative, Southern Oregon Success (SORS), the “aha moment” around positive and adverse childhood experiences was more of an “aha month.”

Please join us for our new series Education Upended: Talking Out of Turn . This monthly series will feature a conversation facilitated by Lara Kain, PACEsConnection Education Consultant , with special guests on education related current events and hot topics. We will use a trauma-informed and PACEs science aware lens to examine what is going on K-12 education, what needs changing, and strategies being used in the field to disrupt harmful policies and make positive changes in the system.

Eisner Health's Journey Through Implementing Trauma Informed Care Since July 2020, ACEs Aware has awarded 185 grants totaling $45.1 million to organizations statewide to augment the state of California’s work on the ACEs Aware initiative. Origins Training & Consulting received one of these grants to tell the story of Eisner Health's journey in implementing a trauma-informed approach. I was grateful to be on both sides of this project and am so proud of both teams. Lori Chelius provided...

By Guest Author, 10/19/21, positiveexperience.org/blog On October 15 th , the American Academy of Pediatrics released the sixth snapshot in the Family Snapshots: Life during the Pandemic series. This snapshot highlights parent and caregiver concerns about their children falling behind in school. This is the latest in a series of articles about the results of a survey of 9000 US parents and caregivers that the HOPE team, in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics , Prevent Child...

By Tara Siegel Bernard, The New York Times, October 11, 2021 Kindergarten often brings a flood of notices about events, school supplies and class photos. But when Vaniqua Hudson-Figueroa’s daughter started at a public school in Queens, there was one that Ms. Hudson-Figueroa wasn’t expecting: The city had opened a college savings account in her child’s name — and it already had $100 in it. For Ms. Hudson-Figueroa, the account opens up possibilities she didn’t know she had when she was her...

By Eric Lutz and Erin McCormick, The Guardian, October 15, 2021 R esidents of Benton Harbor, Michigan , a predominantly Black city that has dealt with elevated lead levels in its water for at least three years, have welcomed an announcement by the governor that all lead lines in the city would be replaced over the next 18 months. The governor, Gretchen Whitmer, promised an “all-hands-on-deck” approach to addressing the water crisis that has been plaguing this impoverished city since at least...

By Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic, October 14, 2021 E arly on the evening of October 23, 2019, I took a tour of the Lorraine Motel. I’d been to Memphis, Tennessee, several times before, and I’d come back to speak at the National Civil Rights Museum, which encompasses the motel. But until that October, I’d never been able to bring myself to visit the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. I saw what King saw moments before he saw no more. His second-floor room had been preserved.