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By John Kelly, The Chronicle of Social Change, January 26, 2020. A new federal report has found nothing new: time in foster care is associated with negative circumstances later in life. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just published findings from a fairly novel approach to assessing the impact of foster care experience as people move from young adulthood into middle age-dom. A group of researchers within HHS used six years of responses to the National Survey of Family...

By John Kelly, The Chronicle of Social Change. Tavon Rolbiecki was born exposed to multiple drugs and alcohol. While relatives stepped up to take him home, he ended up in Chisago County foster care. Latonia Rolbiecki became a licensed foster parent, favored by an independent expert as the right person to raise Tavon. That didn’t persuade Chisago County. An eight-day hearing would determine if Chisago County unjustly kept Latonia Rolbiecki from her grandson – and if it was too late to make...

By Brentin Mock, City Lab, January 28, 2020. On November 18, two women walked in through the unlocked door of a vacant three-bedroom house on West Oakland’s Magnolia Street, set up small bedrooms for themselves and their children, and settled in for an occupation designed to call attention to the Bay Area’s housing affordability crisis. Over the next few months, this collective of formerly unhoused women grew in size—and power. Calling themselves Moms 4 Housing , the group remained in 2928...

A word of encouragement from Pete Walker about the ongoing struggle in dealing with Flashbacks, and how setting your expectation can make a world of difference in your healing journey.

In a new policy brief from the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research, Zach Newman and Lisa R. Pruitt write that California's legal-aid system should be funded with sensitivity to rural needs in order to deliver adequate legal aid to all Californians, wherever they reside. Key Facts: Rural homelessness in California is rising, sometimes more quickly than its urban equivalent. High rural eviction rates are caused in part by inadequate access to legal assistance in rural communities. New laws...

SAN FRANCISCO , Jan. 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ The Center for Youth Wellness announces the release of an in-depth study on the health-related cost of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in the state of California . A number of studies have investigated the cost of child maltreatment, but the current study, entitled " Adult health burden and costs in California during 2013 associated with prior adverse childhood experiences ," is the first to examine the cost associated with adult health...

By Marlon Peterson, The Marshall Project, January 23, 2020. I celebrated the 10th anniversary of my release from a New York prison in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. I was there to participate in The Year of Return , a countrywide commemoration of the 400 years since the first Africans were trafficked to the British colony now known as Virginia. Yes, I went to Afrochella . But on December 23—10 years to the day that I left prison—I was compelled to visit the Cape Coast Castle, a trading...

By Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR, January 28, 2020. Shortly after she gave birth to her son last May, Meghan Reddick, 36, began to struggle with depression. "The second I had a chance where I wasn't holding [my son], I would go to my room and cry," says Reddick, who lives with her son and husband. "And I probably couldn't count how many hours a day I cried." Reddick is among the many women who suffer from depression during pregnancy and after childbirth . "There's this kind of myth that women...

By Lanesha McPherson, The Hechinger Report, January 27, 2020. Educators today hear a lot about attending to students’ social-emotional needs and implementing “trauma-informed” practices. For some, I’m sure this sounds like jargon, but that’s not the case in the University City school district in Missouri, where I teach. Here, we have embraced the goal of “humanizing” school and returning joy to our classrooms. Our district is located just six miles from Ferguson, where Michael Brown was...

By Jenna Grace, PsychCentral, January 17, 2020. Capturing your thoughts in writing can seem daunting at first. Trust me, I’ve been a writer for most of my life and the blank page can still feel intimidating. And putting your thoughts and feelings in writing can feel uncomfortable. Because confronting your thoughts and feelings can be difficult. But writing doesn’t have to be painful. In fact, it’s one of the best forms of therapy we have. It requires no one else. You can do it for yourself.

Photo credit: Texasarchitects.org An updated map of laws and resolutions addressing ACEs science and trauma-informed policies is now available in the “Laws and Resolutions” section of Map the Movement (you can also find "Map the Movement" on the navigation bar on the ACEs Connection home page). The earliest law on the map was passed in the state of Washington in 2011, creating an ACEs science public-private partnership. The data base of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) is...

My book Victim to Victory, Healing generational abuse from my bloodline, is a book that might interest you or someone you know. If so, you can receive the first 3 chapters for free if you log onto the site below and fill out the form at the end of the introductory page. If anyone is interested in doing a discussion of my book through social media or podcasts I would be happy to mail you a copy for free. https://www.healingpain.solutions/ I thought sharing some of the reviews would be helpful...