Blog

Imagine what our communities would be like if mindfulness and compassion were at the heart of city leadership. This vision is driving the Mindful Cities Initiative, a new social innovation project of the Foundation for a Mindful Society. The Mindful Cities Initiative heralds a new phase in the development of mindfulness in society. People are increasingly talking about the benefits of mindfulness practice in holistic terms: about personal wellness and public health, about mindfulness in the...

Children who experience shame have a difficult time asking for what they need. They express themselves through subterfuge, manipulation, challenging behavior. The message is almost always the same. They are asking for connection...In so doing, no matter how they do it, they are risking the rejection they most fear.

Miracle Messages is a nonprofit “reunion service” that reconnects people experiencing homelessness with their loved ones. The nonprofit sends volunteers out to record messages through video, audio and text, and with the help of volunteer online “detectives,” finds and shares those messages with loved ones. There are over half a million homeless people in the United States, and a variety of ways people who experience homelessness lose touch with loved ones. It might be something as...

Aaron Schaidle, BSN, RN is a new school nurse working in Indiana. He contacted me via Twitter to share his view of why we need a school nurse in every school. Aaron provides a compelling perspective on safe staffing, through his lens as a new school nurse. I appreciate Aaron adding his voice to this important discussion. The health and safety of our students and staff are at risk, why is this even a question in 2019? But, as we know it is...there is no shortage of school nurses willing to...

Elizabeth Huntley recalls the day when her family’s life was turned upside down. “One day my mom woke up and she packed up all of our clothes, all five of us…and she took me and my younger sister who had the same father… down to my paternal grandmother’s house…and she left us there. She took my middle sister to a town near Birmingham, Ala., and left her there. She took my only brother and an older sister back to Huntsville and left them at a sister’s house. Then she went back to that housing...

Being an urban transportation planner these days is no walk (or e-scooter ride) in the park. A well-intentioned city official will strive to allocate street space to benefit the most people—especially those of limited means—but the rapid pace of technological change makes things ever more complicated. Indeed, it's hard for even the savviest of experts to anticipate which new modes of transportation will succeed and which are merely fads. And urbanites enthused about a new service will be...

The Supreme Court upheld the federal government's 19th-century treaty with the Montana -based Crow Tribe this week, in what community advocates and legal experts are heralding as a victory for Native American rights . The case reaffirms the Constitutional supremacy of treaty rights signed between the United States and Native nations, amid continued standoffs between tribal and state administrations over the historic agreements. On Monday, the court ruled 5–4 to uphold an 1868 treaty between...

By A. Hosack, K. Hecht, & P. Berman I hurt my Davy again. I hurt him bad. There is blood everywhere. How could I do it? Claire had come upstairs from her part-time job at the grocery store. She was covered in sweat and exhausted from putting food on the shelves. What did she find, when she just wanted to strip and take a cold shower? Davy cutting up her new diploma from Dental Hygiene School. She was supposed to hang this on her wall at work! This was her proof she was really a...

On June 26th during the Beyond Paper Tigers 2019 Conference, CRI will be screening two documentary films by KPJR and directed by Jamie Redford- Paper Tigers, and Resilience: Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope. We are excited and fortunate to be joined by Dianna Cardenas, Shelly Phipps, Jayne Eacker, and Erica (Riki) Wauchek- a former student of Lincoln High School and current staff. Shelly Phipps, Intervention Specialist, and Dianna Cardenas, Lincoln graduate of 2014 will open the...

In May 2018, Kaiser Permanente, the largest private integrated care system in the US, announced that it would invest $200 million through its Thriving Communities Fund to address the affordable housing crisis in California’s Bay Area. Then in 2019, Kaiser announced that it used the fund to purchase an apartment building in a diverse but quickly gentrifying neighborhood in Oakland with the express purpose of making repairs and upgrades to improve health in the building and to ensure...

For Nataraja Kumar, 47, a fisherman from Guru Nagar , a sleepy coastal village in Sri Lanka's north, it's no longer possible to continue with his traditional livelihood. "I went fishing as a 10-year-old boy with my father and grandfather. But I will not train my son to be a fisherman. There's no fish to catch," he tells Mongabay. Fishing is Kumar's only life skill, and he has five mouths to feed. Having failed to eke out a living in the past two years as a fisherman, Kumar is now slowly...

One of the most frustrating aspects of many school reforms efforts of the past several decades is the intense focus on test scores with far less attention, if any, on the personal experiences that students bring to the classroom and how those who have suffered chronic stress are affected. The rise of social-emotional learning in recent years has been seen as a move toward embracing the idea of dealing with the whole child in school, but many SEL programs don’t use trauma-informed...