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Dr. Elizabeth Grady is a pediatrician at the South San Francisco Clinic, a community clinic of San Mateo Medical Center. She and Susana Flores , a senior public health nurse with San Mateo County Health, spoke with me about how the clinic and other health agencies in San Mateo have been able to craft ways to work together to prevent and heal toxic stress in children. Grady also talked about how she and Flores have been working with the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative (RBC), a group of...

If you follow me online you know I teach that Childhood PTSD is, at it’s root, a brain injury, and that therefore, resilience begins with healing the brain. This comes as a HUGE relief to most people with Childhood PTSD. It explains so much. They feel understood for the first time, and give themselves over to the work of healing. And then... obstacles appear! And mostly, they come from (of all places) within. It's normal, but if we don't build strengths to overcome inner obstacles, we get...

By Josh Sattely, Healthy Places By Design, October 10, 2019 As a board member for Healthy Places by Design who works on affordable housing at the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, I often tout the connection between health and housing. Luckily, and somewhat belatedly, society increasingly understands just how interconnected housing and health are when considering challenges related to access, affordability, location, quality, and racial disparities. (Healthy Places by Design offers an...

By Denisa R. Superville, Education Week, November 5, 2019 The country's second-largest school district—where 82 percent of students are Latino and African American—is tapping principals to root out racial bias and inequitable practices in their schools. Los Angeles Unified School District and the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California have partnered to train principals and other school leaders to tackle systemic inequities. The Racial Equity Leadership Academy for...

By Kelly Farrell, The Paducah Sun, November 10, 2019 Adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress are of grave concern to Dr. Patrick Withrow, outreach director for Baptist Health Paducah. "I absolutely agree this is a major public health crisis," he said, on toxic stress. Withrow and other panelists addressed a crowded Barnes Auditorium Saturday morning at Carson-Myre Heart Center about "ACEs," toxic stress, prevention and awareness. Their panel was part of the 13th annual Addiction &...

In our trauma-informed classrooms blog post last week, we talked about choices. We mentioned the benefit of having a space in the room where a child can go to help them calm down and become regulated. While this has become increasingly common at the elementary level, we have found that this is a tool that can work for students of all ages. Even when we survey adults about the things that help them to calm down when they are upset, one of the most common answers we hear is that they want time...

Hello ACEs and Trauma-Informed Community, My name is Travis Hales, and I am a researcher at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. I have recently collaborated with the University at Buffalo's Institute on Trauma and Trauma-Informed Care to conduct a multi-year study on the impact of a substance-use residential agency adopting and implementing Trauma-Informed Care on a variety of organizational, staff, and client level outcomes. I wanted to briefly share the results of our study that...

Treatment fails when we provide traumatized families a plan to heal the child’s problems but do not troubleshoot loopholes or practice the plan’s delivery with dress rehearsals. Stuck families need help onboarding a plan otherwise it will fail. The FST (Family Systems Trauma) Model developed a Troubleshooting Countermoves Checklist that allows both the therapist and the family to identify any potential loopholes and “what will you do if?” scenarios to proactively address each one. A...

Please welcome these 4 new communities from CA, IN, and England to ACEs Connection . More information about each one of them is below. You can also find theses communities among this list of all our communities . ACEs Indiana Coalition Established in 2019, the ACEs Indiana Coalition strives to bring together organizations throughout Indiana to build resilient and self-healing communities. In addition, the coalition assists in the management of Indiana’s ACEs Interface program. This page...

By Bella DePaulo, PsychCentral, October 21, 2019 If you live in the U.S. and you think that your fellow Americans’ trust in the federal government and in each other has been taking a hit recently, then you have something in common with most of them. In a study of trust and distrust in America, based on a nationally representative sample of 10,618 U.S. adults, the Pew Research Center found that 75% of the participants believed that trust in the federal government has been shrinking.

By Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, and James Doubek, National Public Radio, November 10, 2019 A regular drumbeat of mass shootings in the U.S., both inside schools and out, has ramped up pressure on education and law enforcement officials to do all they can to prevent the next attack. Close to all public schools in the U.S. conducted some kind of lockdown drill in 2015-2016, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Last year, 57% of teens told researchers they...

By Michael Butler, City Wide Stories, November 1, 2019 Healing Hurt People started in 2008 as an initiative to help victims of violence heal and deal with the trauma of their injuries; more than a decade later the organization has created a sustainable model for hospitals across the city of Philadelphia. Young men that have dealt with violence are encouraged to go through training, become community peer health workers, and help those who have gone through similar experiences. We spoke with...