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Mental health is at the forefront of gun violence prevention conversations among Texas legislators this session, but advocates for people with mental illness are wary of that focus. After the Santa Fe High School shooting in May that left 10 dead and 13 others wounded, Gov. Greg Abbott held a series of roundtable discussions around school safety that resulted in proposals like more resources for school safety personnel and closing gaps around mental health access. He named school safety as...

Please join us on Thursday, March 21st for a special virtual screening of Broken Places , the latest U.S. documentary on early childhood trauma and resilience. The film will be offered via a private Vimeo link with passcode to all registered members of ACEs Connection, for free, accessible in the United States and internationally. REGISTER TODAY: To register, please visit : https://goo.gl/forms/apdoINwgtQmydEXK2 The viewing portal for the film will open on Vimeo at 6am EST and close at 11pm...

To read the announcement and all details, click HERE and see below key dates. BUILD is looking to support dynamic collaboratives driving sustainable improvements in community health. Are you ready to BUILD with us? For this new third cohort, BUILD is looking to support up to 17 innovative collaboratives across the US t hat include a community-based organization, hospital or health system, and public health department working together in dynamic ways to address upstream challenges and drive...

In looking at the impact of childhood trauma, you can’t get much clearer than this: In 2017, ACEs among Tennessee adults led to an estimated $5.2 billion in direct medical costs and lost productivity from employees missing work. That’s just one year, according to the new report, “ The Economic Cost of ACEs in Tennessee ," released on Feb. 1, 2019 by The Sycamore Institute in Nashville, Tenn. And to provide some perspective, $5.2 billion is one-seventh of the state’s annual budget . This $5.2...

“Forgotten.” In the months after Hurricane Harvey slammed the Texas Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, that was the word I heard repeatedly from renters, homeowners and disaster case managers in small towns and rural communities. The help that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and state leaders promised hadn’t arrived. They feared their communities would be left behind, overshadowed by larger cities like Houston. In some cases, their homes looked as if Harvey had just hit — not the year...

Inside an abandoned warehouse on the northern end of downtown Houston is an encampment where approximately 20 homeless people stay each year. The ground is covered with cardboard, old newspapers, and plastic bottles of water coated in grime. On one wall, a mural reads: "Look for the Beauty Within the Most Frightening." At the moment, there's no one here. The people who live in this "community," as retired Houston Police Sergeant Steve Wick describes it, have been asked to clear out for the...

When you first hear about it, it sounds unlikely, fact that something that happened to someone in utero, at the age of two months, or four years, or any time in childhood, is what is killing them as an adult, or making them want to die, or making them want to hurt themselves or others. Yet the connection between childhood trauma and adult disease, mental illness, addiction, suicide, violence – most all of society’s ills – is as irrefutable as the myriad truths revealed about it in the...

W hen Arianna walked into a church basement in Austin to take a free pregnancy test, she thought of it as a lark, a way to kill time during the long, dull days of life as a street kid. About a month before, she had run away from the Austin Oaks mental health facility and was now living with her boyfriend in an alley near the Texas Capitol. The idea of being pregnant was laughable. “It was just laughs and giggles while we were waiting in line,” she said. Afterward, she remembers one of the...

If teachers and parents want children to develop resilience and strength, a better approach is to teach them self-compassion, said Dr. Kristin Neff, a psychology professor at the University of Texas and author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself . How Self-Compassion Supports Academic Motivation When a student develops self-compassion, the seat of motivation shifts . Neff said that there is an empirical link between self-compassion and growth mindset (the belief...

ACEs Connection presents, "Starting & Growing Resilient Communities: Online & In Real Life (IRL)" , an interactive webinar training series focused on developing existing and potential online community managers and IRL ACEs champions. If you are not a current online community manager, please know that ALL are welcome. This series is dedicated to providing insight into creating sustainable and effective online & IRL ACEs intiatives. "Starting & Growing Resilient Communities:...

“I was one of those statistics that ACEs scientists and researchers talk about,” Dr. Gregory Williams, an administrator in the Baylor College of Medicine, told the school’s first-year class. Williams’ presentation about the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and his own experience as a trauma survivor, was organized by Dr. Reena Isaac of Texas Children’s Hospital for her class, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Understanding and Identifying Victims of Violence.” Williams regularly speaks...

In the aftermath of recent hurricanes and wildfires, the Sesame Street in Communities team wanted to reach out to provide information on our available resources to help families cope in the aftermath of natural disasters, and other traumatic experiences. Bilingual videos, articles, printables and more, are all available for free on our website at www.sesamestreetincommunities.org . Here are the links to a few topic pages that may be most useful to you as you work with families in the...