October 2021

By Jennifer Friend and Sean Boulton, EdSource, October 14, 2021 C arla is a high school senior from Newport Harbor High School who plans to attend college. If you knew Carla two years ago, this would be surprising. During her sophomore year, Carla was struggling in school. Her teacher, who believed her failing grades were related to housing insecurity, referred her to a nonprofit organization working on campus in partnership with the school to serve students experiencing homelessness. The...

By Robert Hansen, Everyone's Internet News, October 24, 2021 On October 5, 2021, Samual Nathaniel Brown, co-founder of the Anti-Violence Safety and Accountability Project (ASAP), creator of the 10P program, and author of the constitutional amendment proposal, The California Abolition Act (ACA 3), recently became one of the first along with 24 other men to graduate with a bachelors in communication from Cal State LA’s Prison B.A. Graduation Initiative on the yard at California State Prison...

By Carolyn Said, San Francisco Chronicle, October 25, 2021 Mirna Arana was pregnant and didn’t feel well. But if she didn’t clean houses, she wouldn’t get paid. So she went to work. She kept cleaning even as cramps racked her body. Then she began to bleed and eventually miscarried. House cleaners, nannies and others who work in private homes rarely get paid sick leave, sometimes forcing them to choose between their health and their paycheck. Now San Francisco is poised to become the first...

Raging wildfires in California and Turkey, hurricanes in the U.S. southeast, flooding in West Africa, droughts in Iraq and Syria and other environmental catastrophes across the globe traumatize hundreds of thousands of people. Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, founder and director of Indigenous Climate Action , has a different view of these events than what we typically see. She says the trauma of climate change spans generations and is interwoven with colonization in the form of modern extraction...

Often, we are confronted with dehumanizing practices in education setting—practices that cause trauma, induce shame, and contribute to the adversity that many children and adults already face. Practices that push us away from our better selves, and strip others of their dignity and humanity. Practices and institutions that punish, harm, exclude, degrade, dismiss, disrespect, and disregard. Educators and students alike have experienced being dehumanized in their school environments at some...

When articles on self-harm are posted, I recommend we understand that diagnoses are merely labels for symptom clusters, almost always resulting from early trauma. Professionals use labels primarily for billing. They are also used widely as derogatory terms, at least when I was working as a mental health professional. "Borderline personality," "dissociative disorders," etc. are shorthand descriptions of desperate coping measures that survivors use to manage the pain from early extreme abuse.

By Andrea Stanley, The Washington Post Magazine, October 27, 2021 J ess Mercer received a call from her stepmom, Annette, that morning, a little after 8 a.m. “We’re coming,” Annette said, her voice so unrecognizable it sounded foreign. Jess was at her apartment in Chico, Calif., a slightly overgrown university town that sits in a valley below the hilltop community of Paradise, about 20 minutes away. She was confused. It was early, on a weekday: Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018. She wasn’t expecting a...

Register Today Friday, November 5, 2021 At California Protective Parents Association, we are so grateful to be co-hosting this special day on Friday, November 5 starting at 9 am PT with UCI Initiative to End Family Violence. This full-day virtual conference will offer multidisciplinary perspectives on protecting children from family violence in the context of child custody or divorce cases. National experts, leading legislators, survivors and courageous kids will address policy reforms,...

The state’s unprecedented investment in children and youth , which will roll out over the next few years , represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine our mental health system centered on equity and justice. California's bold action acknowledges a growing national consensus that the mental health crisis among children has become a national emergency. Key to achieving the state's vision is creating a workforce that engages people with lived experience as peer providers,...

The Dibble Institute is pleased to present an introductory webinar by Rev. Dr. Bryant T. Marks Sr. of the National Training Institute on Race and Equity , which will provide foundational information on implicit bias. It will focus at the individual level and discuss how implicit bias affects everyone. Strategies to reduce or manage implicit bias will be discussed. Broadly speaking, group-based bias involves varying degrees of stereotyping (exaggerated beliefs about others), prejudice...

By Eden Stiffman, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, October 18, 2021 Alan Kwok began his job as director of climate and disaster resilience at Northern California Grantmakers in November of 2018. Barely a week later, sparks from a faulty electric transmission line ignited the Camp Fire, which began its devastating spread through Northern California’s Butte County. The blaze became the most destructive and deadly wildfire in the state’s history, burning an area nearly the size of Chicago. “There...

By Jenny Gold, California Healthline, October 21, 2021 For parents living in poverty, “diaper math” is a familiar and distressingly pressing daily calculation. Babies in the U.S. go through six to 10 disposable diapers a day, at an average cost of $70 to $80 a month. Name-brand diapers with high-end absorption sell for as much as a half a dollar each, and can result in upwards of $120 a month in expenses. One in every three American families cannot afford enough diapers to keep their infants...