Blog

Live Webinar: Building Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses Monday, October 28 th , 2019 12:00-1:30 PM PDT You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming...

ACEs Connection member, Rev. James Encinas, joined Teri Wellbrock, host of The Healing Place Podcast, on air for a heart-felt conversation to discuss his work with teachers on a trauma-informed and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) healing level, his personal story of triumph, along with a discussion on his books, and much more.

By Naveed Saleh, MDLinx, August 29, 2019 Domestic terrorism has become a nationwide epidemic—and it’s contagious. As of this writing, there have been 271 mass shootings in 2019, leaving 290 people dead and 1,121 injured, according to the non-profit organization Gun Violence Archive. In early August, the mass shootings in Dayton, OH, and El Paso, TX, resulted in the deaths of 31 people in less than one day’s time. Researchers have found that mass shootings are contagious, in the sense that...

By Justin Vicory, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, August 29, 2019 For close to seven years, a Mississippi man bought firearms in and around Natchez before sending them to contacts in Chicago, many of them family members he grew up with. Once there, the weapons would find their way to the streets of some of the city’s most violence-plagued communities and be used in homicides, shootings and other crimes. In one case, in 2014, a bullet struck college freshman Malcolm Stuckey in the back...

By A. Hosack, K. Hecht & P. Berman, I tried to be a slave to Larry- doing everything he wanted to escape the loneliness. I don’t feel lonely when I am with the Carsons- am I acting like a slave again? Claire found it very hard to start writing down her memories of Larry. But, after that day in the woods when she finally got started, she had been able to write down one memory a day; her notebook now had ten pages of memories in it. She just wasn’t sure she ever wanted to share these with...

In 2019, the Maine Resilience Building Network grew up. After seven years of operating as a volunteer-driven, grass-roots, cross-sector coalition devoted to building resilience for the state’s children, families and communities, MRBN developed a business plan, applied for non-profit status and hired its first two paid staff. That work was supported by the Bingham Program, a charitable endowment at Tufts Medical Center and a longtime funder of MRBN, formed in 2012 to educate individuals and...

When it comes to being trauma-informed in ministry settings, one of the joys I find in the process is that “everything old is new again,” in the sense that many of the structures and patterns that are a part of traditional worship styles can be very grounding and helpful for those working through past trauma. For instance, the reassurance of the liturgical calendar and its various seasons is very comforting to my family, and each of us have trauma or adversity in our past. Knowing that every...

(From left to right) State Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris, Rep. Jackie Speier, and Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, participate in a town hall meeting on gun violence at Lincoln High School in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, August 27 Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle Editor's note: In her role as state surgeon general, Dr. Harris addressed gun violence as preventable and important to treat as a public health issue. She said that in 2017, there were...

By Sammy Caiola, Capital Public Radio, August 27, 2019 A bulletin board at the La Familia Counseling Center in South Sacramento is crowded with flyers advertising everything from homework clubs to help with preparing taxes. The nonprofit center has offered free programs to the neighborhood’s large Latino population for decades. But in a year marked by immigration raids, mass shootings and family separations at the border, staff say it’s been a challenge to bring people together. Executive...

By Nila Bala and James Dold, The Hill, August 27, 2019 Over the last three decades, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, thousands of children have been warehoused in prisons with adults. We have usually ignored the cages these children are in because they were convicted of crimes in the adult criminal justice system. But we cannot ignore the fact that regardless of what they have done, they are still our children. Congress has a chance to enact reforms that assist...

By Marvin Krislov, Forbes, August 27, 2019 There is a mental health crisis on America’s college campuses. Increasingly, today’s students are lonely. More and more of them are anxious. Many are experiencing depression. And that’s leading them to college counseling centers at ever-increasing rates. One major recent study showed that 75% of current college students say they need help for emotional or mental health problems. Most colleges and universities are determined to support their students...

By Bobby Allyn, National Public Radio, August 27, 2019 The College Board is dropping its plan to give SAT-takers a single score that captures a student's economic hardship. The change comes after blowback from university officials and parents of those taking the college admissions exam. Announced in May, the "adversity score" was intended to assess the kind of neighborhood the student came from, including factors such as the portion of students receiving free or reduced lunch, the level of...