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PI partners on the Stronger Scholarship, which will award three $7,000 scholarships to young health equity changemakers Young people are actively changing the world. They bring new ideas, strategies, and perspectives to issues our communities have been struggling to overcome for decades. Young people are taking to the streets, mobilizing, and speaking out against racial injustices, health inequities, and environmental racism—all with heart, hope, and vision. In recognition of the important...

As a community, we have been reading Donna Jackson Nakazawa's book, Childhood Disrupted as part of our Common Read initiative. Now, we will get to experience her research directly and deepen our learning together at the Creating a Resilient Community Conference on April 20 - 21, 2021! Early Registration Ends Friday! REGISTER HERE The Peace and Justice Institute at Valencia College, Early Learning Coalition of Orange County, Creating a Resilient Community Network and Title Sponsor, Orlando...

By Audrey McNamara, CBS News, March 2, 2021 A new report from Save the Children found that Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and New Mexico ranked as the worst states for children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Louisiana and Mississippi consistently placed in the bottom 10 of states for the last five months of 2020. Save the Children ranked states based on data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau's bi-weekly Household Pulse Survey . The resulting report, "Childhood in the Time of COVID," analyzed...

New data reports are now available that detail the number of Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) screenings conducted in California between January 1 and June 30, 2020, and the number of providers who have completed the “ Becoming ACEs Aware in California ” core online training. Since launching the ACEs Aware initiative in December 2019, more than 15,500 providers have taken the training. About 9,100 Medi-Cal providers in California have attested to completing the training and are receiving...

By Will Matsuda, National Public Radio, February 27, 2021 When most people think about traditional nature photography, black and white images of towering mountains and rushing rivers in the American West are often what comes to mind. It's a genre that was made popular by men like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, whose work in the early 1900s often positioned the natural world as something that is remote, wild and untouched. But missing from this tradition is another kind of landscape — the...

By Leah Asmelash, CNN, March 1, 2021 Black women are the mules of the world, Zora Neale Hurston wrote in 1937. More than 80 years later, Hurston's words in "Their Eyes Were Watching God" still ring true, but one filmmaker is on a journey to both expose that truth and alleviate it. Oge Egbuonu's new documentary, "(In)visible Portraits," is what she calls a love letter to Black women, and a reeducation for everyone else. The 90-minute feature, set to premiere on Oprah Winfrey's OWN on March 2,...

By Jim Daley, Scientific American, March 1, 2021 Since Black Lives Matter protests gained national prominence following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the movement has spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. Now a new study shows police homicides have significantly decreased in most cities where such protests occurred. Black Lives Matter (BLM) began when Oakland, Calif.–based activist Alicia Garza posted a message of protest on Facebook after George...

By Margarita Alegría, STAT, February 9, 2021 Gonzales is a small city in central California populated mostly by Latino immigrant families and farmworkers. Like other places, it has felt the weight of the coronavirus pandemic. When Covid-19 hit, the city’s youth council conducted an online mental health survey of middle and high schoolers. The students received an overwhelming response that revealed high levels of anxiety symptoms and stress among their peers. The findings were a wake-up call...

By Lindsay Braman, February 15, 2021 By now, most counselors, pediatricians, teachers, and other people who work with children know about ACES: The “Adverse Childhood Experiences” scale. ACE’s predict , based on measuring the number of traumatic or adverse events experienced, which kids are likely to struggle developmentally and emotionally as they mature. (You can take the ACES quiz here ). New results from a survey based on a study of 6188 adults at Johns Hopkins shows that there are 7...

By Melissa Reid, Seventh-day Adventist Church, February 26, 2021 On Thursday, February 25, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives once again passed the LGBT anti-discrimination bill “The Equality Act” (H.R. 5). While the Seventh-day Adventist Church firmly believes that everyone is created in the image of God and should be treated with dignity, compassion, and respect, the Church remains concerned that the Equality Act as drafted would further erode the religious liberty of faith...

By Jessica Grose, The New York Times, February 24, 2021 I don’t know how else to put it, but lately it seems like my brain is broken. I’m not functioning with the mental quickness I’m used to. I find myself struggling to locate words I want to use, like “vigilant” (it took me a full day to remember it). Sometimes when I’m especially tired in the evenings, I will trail off midsentence, and when my husband asks a follow-up question I will have completely lost my train of thought — it drives...

By Cory Turner, Christine Herman, Rhitu Chatterjee, National Public Radio, January 18, 2021 A bag of Doritos, that's all Princess wanted. Her mom calls her Princess, but her real name is Lindsey. She's 17 and lives with her mom, Sandra, a nurse, outside of Atlanta. On May 17, 2020, a Sunday, Lindsey decided she didn't want breakfast; she wanted Doritos. So she left home and walked to Family Dollar, taking her pants off on the way, while her mom followed on the phone with police. Lindsey has...