Blog

To mark the anniversary of the passage of the landmark legislation of the Georgia Mental Health Parity Act, we are sharing a letter written a year ago by Roland Behm, Co-founder of the Georgia Mental Health Policy Partnership, Board Member and Former Board Chair, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) Georgia Chapter. The letter is to his son, Kyle, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2010 as a junior in college and died by suicide in August 2019.

To read more of Sharon Roety and Jaime Zaplatosch's article, please click here. At our respective organizations, Children & Nature Network and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), we reflect on how nature and healthy environments impact children and communities. As a senior vice president at Children & Nature Network, Jaime thinks about this every day, reflecting on research that shows nature makes kids healthier, happier , and smarter . As a senior program officer at RWJF...

Image: COURTESY: ASPIRE PUBLIC SCHOOLS To read more of Cora Palma's article, please click here. Those of us who work in schools don’t need statistics to tell us that our children are in crisis; the research corroborates our lived experience. Since 2017, rates of anxiety and depression among California’s children have shot up by 70% and one-third of California adolescents experienced serious psychological distress between 2019 and 2021, including a 20% increase in adolescent suicides. The...

A joyous celebration on Friday, February 10, 2023 honoring the leadership of Area Superintendent Lindsay Reese , Principal Amanda Clark, and all staff members with San Diego Workforce Innovation High Schools’ Chula Vista, Linda Vista and National City Learning Centers! Area Superintendent Reese reflected on the TREC Accreditation and shared, "Trauma Resilient Educational Communities provide a safe and supportive environment for students to heal from their past traumas, while also equipping...

To read more of VICKI ZAKRZEWSKI 's article, please click here. “There is so much grief in schools right now, from the loss of staff and family members,” a wellness expert at a California County Office of Education recently told me. “We can’t touch wellness until we address the grief.” I understood this only too well, having lost my classroom aide to suicide almost 20 years ago—a loss that led me to the work I do today. To better understand how the adults in schools can help students—and...

Back in 2019, we began planning to write a book, From Trauma to Resiliency, that would describe the experiences of survivors who have experienced multiple traumas and who have benefitted from relationship-based, collaborative family-school-community-based services. We asked colleagues doing amazing work in San Diego County to contribute chapters, and they shared stories of oppressed, traumatized groups of survivors that include, people who have faced abuse, war, and poverty,...

To watch the 1-minute video, please click here.

By Junlei Li, 3/29/23, https://positiveexperience.org/category/blog/ Throughout the Week of HOPE, we will be sharing stories of practicing the HOPE framework. As we conclude our first day of the HOPE Summit , we can reflect on the ways to promote HOPE many different settings. The interview below is a great example of how to practice the HOPE framework in educational settings. Junlei Li, a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education shares the impact of human relationships on...

Information from Summit Brochure and registration site available here . North Carolina’s first Statewide Trauma Summit – a virtual and in-person summit – will beheld Thursday and Friday, April 27-28, in Raleigh, at The McKimmon Conference and Training Center, Summit leaders announced recently. “Momentum is growing in NC for building trauma-informed systems that strengthen resilience and weed out systemic and often intergenerational sources of child trauma. To advance this work, it is...

SDCOE and CIEFA's Native Ways of Knowing Book List: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Classrooms and Libraries To help educators and parents choose high-quality Indigenous authored books, the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) and California Indian Education (CIEFA) have designed this Native Ways of Knowing Book List: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Classrooms and Libraries. These books have been vetted by Native American scholars, CIEFA, and SDCOE staff. Please consider adding these...

In January, Resilient Georgia and the Center for Interrelational Science and Pediatrics received a Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning Community Transformation Grant to launch an Infant and Early Childhood Professional Development Course and Guidebook. Across Resilient Georgia’s 16 regional coalitions , there is a documented need to support the early childhood care and education (ECCE) workforce. Leveraging statewide support for training Georgia’s workforce in the Community...

School shootings are tragic, but parents, students, and school staff can take steps to prevent them, researchers report. PHOTO BY MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES To read more of Beverly Kingston and Sarah Goodrum's article, please click here. We are sociologists at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado, Boulder. We study the circumstances that lead to violence in which an attacker picks a target —like a person, group, or school—in advance. We find that...